Four myths government and media use to scare us about 'dictators'

Good article about the current manufactured "crisis" with Iran from the author of Wag the Dog.

Four Myths Government and Media Use to Scare Us About 'Dictators'
By Larry Beinhart
AlterNet
October 2, 2007

We have a basic mythology: Appeasement of dictators leads to war. The historical basis for this narrative is the "appeasement" of Hitler at Munich. It encouraged him to believe the democracies -- and the Soviets -- were weak and would not oppose him. That led him to attempt more conquests and engulfed us all in the Second World War.

If the other countries had stood up to him right away, the theory goes, he would have backed down. If he hadn't, they would have gone to war and nipped him in the bud, thereby preventing WWII, the Holocaust, the deaths of 60 million and all the rest of the horrors.

Now we are floating the story that Mahmoud Ahmenajad is a dictator (the new, new Hitler, after Saddam Hussein). If we "appease" him, it will only encourage him and that will engulf us in World War Three.

If we accept the myth as a gospel truth that should guide our political and military lives, and accept that description as true, it makes good sense -- it is even necessary -- to start another preventive war, like the one in Iraq, to stop him now! Let us examine the facts.

Fog Fact No. 1: The president of Iran is not a dictator.

He is not even the most powerful person in Iran.

The position of president used to be a figurehead, but recently it was combined with that of prime minister and now has much real power. However, he does not control the army and the intelligence and security services. He does not have the power to go to war.

The president is elected by direct popular vote. There have been five so far. None has served more than two terms. Ahmenajad is in his first term. His previous office was as mayor of Tehran. He is a loud mouth, jingoistic conservative, rather like -- dare we say it? -- the current incarnation of Rudolph Giuliani in his run for U.S. president.

The best way to grasp how Iran is governed is to take its name quite literally: The Islamic Republic of Iran. It is a theocracy, but within the bounds of that -- which are fairly strict bounds -- it is run by elected officials.

The man at the top is called the supreme leader. His constitutional title is "Leader of the Revolution."

The supreme leader is commander-in-chief, with control of the army and the intelligence and security services. He can make the decision to go to war. He has a great many additional powers, including control of the state radio and television networks.

The supreme leader is elected -- and can be dismissed -- by the Assembly of Experts. This is an 86-member congress. They, in turn, are directly elected by popular vote, but must be Mujtahids, Islamic scholars qualified to practice Islamic law.

The way all this is kept under proper Islamic Revolutionary control is that all candidates for everything have to be approved before they can get on the ballot by the Council of Guardians.

There are 12 members. Half are appointed by the supreme leader. The other half are elected by the Iranian parliament from a list supplied by the head of judiciary (who is named by the supreme leader). They are all clerics and scholars of Islamic law. In sum, it is a republic, with many checks and balances, and real elections within theocratic limits. Everybody in government has to be a respectably devout Muslim, with the exception that of the 290 members of parliament there are five representatives from the recognized minority religions (two Armenian Christian, one Chaldean/Assyrian Catholic, one Jewish, one Zoroastrian).

An Iranian, or some other opponent of the United States, might claim that the cost of running for office here creates a de facto council of the wealthy that vets all candidates, excluding anyone who would work against their interests. They might also note that the elected members of the U.S. federal government are 93 percent Christian (including Catholics and Mormons), 7 percent Jewish, with a single Muslim, no pantheists and no atheists, almost a religious mirror image, of the makeup of the Iranian political class.

Fog Fact No. 2: The "appeasement" in the myth is very specific and rather narrow.

It refers to one country taking over the territory -- or the whole -- of another country. Then the world allowing that to stand. In 1938, Germany under Hitler annexed Austria. Hitler had already remilitarized the Rhineland -- which was supposed to be a demilitarized zone protecting France -- and taken over the Saar, a small area rich with coal and iron. Then he took over the Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia. Its population, which was over 80 percent ethnically German, desired the annexation. However, it contained most of Czechoslovakia's defenses against Germany, which meant that if Germany wanted to take the rest, it would be able to so at will.

England, France and the Soviet Union had treaties with Czechoslovakia that obligated them to come to its defense. But they all wanted to avoid, or at least delay, war. So they came to an agreement -- the Munich Agreement -- which allowed Hitler to keep the Sudetenland. In 1939 Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia.

It does not refer to "allowing" one country to posture, threaten, arm or rearm.

Generally, since WWII, when one country has invaded another country, they've either fought to a stalemate (Iraq -- Iran, China -- India, China -- Vietnam, India -- Pakistan), or the invaders put in a friendly regime and then left (Vietnam -- Cambodia, United States -- Panama, Grenada, Dominican Republic) or, with international approval, the invader was kicked out (Iraq -- Kuwait, North Korea -- South Korea.)

But there are some very significant exceptions:

Fog Fact No. 3: Sometimes "appeasement" works well; it was American policy for 50 years.

After the Second World War the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, part of East Prussia and part of Slovakia. Then, mostly through rigged elections, it turned Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria into puppet states and used military force, when necessary, to maintain that status.

Neither the United States -- nor anyone else -- seriously challenged any of that.

Basically, we accepted that anything that happened inside the Iron Curtain -- formed by the positions where the Red Army stopped at the end of the war -- was inside its sphere of influence.

What Truman did do was adopt an active policy of containment. It opposed any attempt of the Soviets to go beyond those lines.

The Soviets did more or less the same. They accepted American hegemony where the American armies had stopped. They vigorously contested any efforts to go beyond that, especially anything that encroached on their sphere of influence. Anything outside those lines -- the Third World and the colonies that the Europeans had reoccupied -- was up for grabs, and all sorts of proxy wars were fought. But the Big One, a Third World War, was averted.

Under Nixon this had the formal name of "détente." There is no doubt that Iran is a "revolutionary" state, as it declares itself to be, and has "revolutionary" dreams, as the Communists used to. It believes that the whole world should eagerly throw off its secular chains and embrace the higher, holier order of Islam.

It wants things that we would prefer not to see happen.

It is also aware of its own physical and military limitations and don't appear to be suicidal.

So while it is prepared to use influence, money and propaganda, and to support violent people who believe as it does, or close to what it does, a reasonable prediction is that there are limits. It proceeds with caution.

It also has multiple interests and are flexible. At one point it offered to trade Al Qaeda terrorists that it was holding to the United States in return for anti-Iranian terrorists that America was holding in Iraq. The Bush administration never got around to replying.

Fog Fact No. 4: Nobody is speaking of what happens after a war with Iran.

The ultimate goal of the strategy of war is the shape of the peace that follows.

This is especially true of a war of choice. If someone attacks you, you fight back, and the goal is to stop them and be safe. But if it's a preemptive or preventive war, then a great deal of thought must be given to what happens after the attack. Will it make us safer? Stronger? More prosperous? How? And for how long?

It is clear that this administration did not give enough thought to that before the invasion of Iraq. There were plenty of dreams about the best-case scenario, but no plans for the worst, and the worst is what happened.

Now we are creating a new fog of mythologies -- about a "dictator" who isn't one, about "appeasement" that is completely inapplicable, about nuclear weapons that don't exist, about a country that is "evil" -- that make it seem like we must do something.

But what will the consequences of military action be? If we've learned but one single thing from the current war in Iraq it's that after we panic ourselves with descriptions of the worst that will happen if we don't act, we had better consider the worst that will happen if we do. And be ready for it.

That's a fact.

***

Larry Beinhart is the author of "Wag the Dog," "The Librarian," and "Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin." All available at nationbooks.org.

Turning Ahmadinejad Into Public Enemy No. 1

From the informed commenter Juan Cole comes this description of the Two Minutes Hate of yet another Middle Easterner by an increasingly moblike, nationalistic America:

Turning Ahmadinejad Into Public Enemy No. 1
Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial is all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war.
by Juan Cole
Salon.com
September 24, 2007

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly has become a media circus. But the controversy does not stem from the reasons usually cited.

The media has focused on debating whether he should be allowed to speak at Columbia University on Monday, or whether his request to visit Ground Zero, the site of the Sept. 11 attack in lower Manhattan, should have been honored. His request was rejected, even though Iran expressed sympathy with the United States in the aftermath of those attacks and Iranians held candlelight vigils for the victims. Iran felt that it and other Shiite populations had also suffered at the hands of al-Qaida, and that there might now be an opportunity for a new opening to the United States.

Instead, the U.S. State Department denounced Ahmadinejad as himself little more than a terrorist. Critics have also cited his statements about the Holocaust or his hopes that the Israeli state will collapse. He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews, even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran’s 20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament.

There is, in fact, remarkably little substance to the debates now raging in the United States about Ahmadinejad. His quirky personality, penchant for outrageous one-liners, and combative populism are hardly serious concerns for foreign policy. Taking potshots at a bantam cock of a populist like Ahmadinejad is actually a way of expressing another, deeper anxiety: fear of Iran’s rising position as a regional power and its challenge to the American and Israeli status quo. The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state.

The neoconservatives are even claiming that the United States has been at war with Iran since 1979. As Glenn Greenwald points out, this assertion is absurd. In the ’80s, the Reagan administration sold substantial numbers of arms to Iran. Some of those beating the war drums most loudly now, like think-tank rat Michael Ledeen, were middlemen in the Reagan administration’s unconstitutional weapons sales to Tehran. The sales would have been a form of treason if in fact the United States had been at war with Iran at that time, so Ledeen is apparently accusing himself of treason.

But the right has decided it is at war with Iran, so a routine visit by Iran’s ceremonial president to the U.N. General Assembly has generated sparks. The foremost cheerleader for such a view in Congress is Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., who recently pressed Gen. David Petraeus on the desirability of bombing Iran in order to forestall weapons smuggling into Iraq from that country (thus cleverly using one war of choice to foment another).

American hawks are beating the war drums loudly because they are increasingly frustrated with the course of events. They are unsatisfied with the lack of enthusiasm among the Europeans and at the United Nations for impeding Tehran’s nuclear energy research program. While the Bush administration insists that the program aims at producing a bomb, the Iranian state maintains that it is for peaceful energy purposes. Washington wants tighter sanctions on Iran at the United Nations but is unlikely to get them in the short term because of Russian and Chinese reluctance. The Bush administration may attempt to create a “coalition of the willing” of Iran boycotters outside the U.N. framework.

Washington is also unhappy with Mohammad ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He has been unable to find credible evidence that Iran has a weapons program, and he told Italian television this week, “Iran does not constitute a certain and immediate threat for the international community.” He stressed that no evidence had been found for underground production sites or hidden radioactive substances, and he urged a three-month waiting period before the U.N. Security Council drew negative conclusions.

ElBaradei intervened to call for calm after French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said last week that if the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear research program were unsuccessful, it could lead to war. Kouchner later clarified that he was not calling for an attack on Iran, but his remarks appear to have been taken seriously in Tehran.

Kouchner made the remarks after there had already been substantial speculation in the U.S. press that impatient hawks around U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney were seeking a pretext for a U.S. attack on Iran. Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation probably correctly concluded in Salon last week that President Bush himself has for now decided against launching a war on Iran. But Clemons worries that Cheney and the neoconservatives, with their Israeli allies, are perfectly capable of setting up a provocation that would lead willy-nilly to war.

David Wurmser, until recently a key Cheney advisor on Middle East affairs and the coauthor of the infamous 1996 white paper that urged an Iraq war, revealed to his circle that Cheney had contemplated having Israel strike at Iranian nuclear research facilities and then using the Iranian reaction as a pretext for a U.S. war on that country. Prominent and well-connected Afghanistan specialist Barnett Rubin also revealed that he was told by an administration insider that there would be an “Iran war rollout” by the Cheneyites this fall.

It should also be stressed that some elements in the U.S. officer corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency are clearly spoiling for a fight with Iran because the Iranian-supported Shiite nationalists in Iraq are a major obstacle to U.S. dominance in Iraq. Although very few U.S. troops in Iraq are killed by Shiites, military spokesmen have been attempting to give the impression that Tehran is ordering hits on U.S. troops, a clear casus belli. Disinformation campaigns that accuse Iran of trying to destabilize the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government — a government Iran actually supports — could lay the groundwork for a war. Likewise, with the U.S. military now beginning patrols on the Iran-Iraq border, the possibility is enhanced of a hostile incident spinning out of control.

The Iranians have responded to all this bellicosity with some chest-thumping of their own, right up to the final hours before Ahmadinejad’s American visit. The Iranian government declared “National Defense Week” on Saturday, kicking it off with a big military parade that showed off Iran’s new Qadr-1 missiles, with a range of 1,100 miles. Before he left Iran for New York on Sunday morning, Ahmadinejad inspected three types of Iranian-manufactured jet fighters, noting that it was the anniversary of Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980 (which the Iranian press attributed to American urging, though that is unlikely).

The display of this military equipment was accompanied by a raft of assurances on the part of the Iranian ayatollahs, politicians and generals that they were entirely prepared to deploy the missiles and planes if they were attacked. A top military advisor to Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei told the Mehr News Agency on Saturday, “Today, the United States must know that their 200,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are within the reach of Iran’s fire. When the Americans were beyond our shores, they were not within our reach, but today it is very easy for us to deal them blows.” Khamenei, the actual commander in chief of the armed forces, weighed in as well, reiterating that Iran would never attack first but pledging: “Those who make threats should know that attack on Iran in the form of hit and run will not be possible, and if any country invades Iran it will face its very serious consequences.”

The threat to target U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the unveiling of the Qadr-1 were not aggressive in intent, but designed to make the point that Iran could also play by Richard M. Nixon’s “madman” strategy, whereby you act so wildly as to convince your enemy you are capable of anything. Ordinarily a poor non-nuclear third-world country might be expected to be supine before an attack by a superpower. But as Mohammad Reza Bahonar, the Iranian deputy speaker of Parliament, warned: “Any military attack against Iran will send the region up in flames.”

In the end, this is hardly the kind of conflagration the United States should be enabling. If a spark catches, it will not advance any of America’s four interests in the Middle East: petroleum, markets, Israel and hegemony.

The Middle East has two-thirds of the world’s proven petroleum reserves and nearly half its natural gas, and its fields are much deeper than elsewhere in the world, so that its importance will grow for the United States and its allies. Petro-dollars and other wealth make the region an important market for U.S. industry, especially the arms industry. Israel is important both for reasons of domestic politics and because it is a proxy for U.S. power in the region. By “hegemony,” I mean the desire of Washington to dominate political and economic outcomes in the region and to forestall rivals such as China from making it their sphere of influence.

The Iranian government (in which Ahmadinejad has a weak role, analogous to that of U.S. vice presidents before Dick Cheney) poses a challenge to the U.S. program in the Middle East. Iran is, unlike most Middle Eastern countries, large. It is geographically four times the size of France, and it has a population of 70 million (more than France or the United Kingdom). As an oil state, it has done very well from the high petroleum prices of recent years. It has been negotiating long-term energy deals with China and India, much to the dismay of Washington. It provides financial support to the Palestinians and to the Lebanese Shiites who vote for the Hezbollah Party in Lebanon. By overthrowing the Afghanistan and Iraq governments and throwing both countries into chaos, the United States has inadvertently enabled Iran to emerge as a potential regional power, which could challenge Israel and Saudi Arabia and project both soft and hard power in the strategic Persian Gulf and the Levant.

And now the American war party, undeterred by the quagmire in Iraq, convinced that their model of New Empire is working, is eager to go on the offensive again. They may yet find a pretext to plunge the United States into another war. Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York this year will not include his visit to Ground Zero, because that is hallowed ground for American patriotism and he is being depicted as not just a critic of the United States but as the leader of an enemy state. His visit may, however, be ground zero for the next big military struggle of the United States in the Middle East, one that really will make Iraq look like a cakewalk.

***

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has just been published. He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.