Iran’s Uranium Mullahs, Again

Austin Bay Blog:

I was on a local radio show Wednesday morning discussing the column I wrote ten days ago on Iran’s nuclear quest. (See the concluding graf quoted at the end of this post).

What to do about Iranian nuclear brinkmanship?

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Timothy Garton Ash blusters in the Guardian. He hits the cultural awareness and strategic threat issues, but fails to come to grips with how to foster internal regime change.

What a stunning example of leftish “process” fixation. Ash says we need to “share information” and reach a “common analysis.” Well, yeah. He does have the cast of charcters right, and I agree with his assessment of Iran’s internal power relationships. It’s a jigsaw of tyranny and terror.

Ash:

We need to share all this information and reach a common analysis. And before we take any step in the diplomatic dance, we need to ask ourselves two questions: how will this affect the Iranian regime, and how will it affect Iranian society? The regime is complex. Ahmadinejad is the president, but not the ultimate boss. The boss of this theocratic regime is the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khameini. Without his say-so, the nuclear seals would not have been broken. But he is constrained by strong interest groups, such as the Revolutionary Guards, and by other ayatollahs, such as the president’s fudamentalist guru, Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi.

Remember, nuclear weapons aren’t the real problem here. It’s the character, psychology, and aims of the men seeking them.

Daniel Pipes’ Jerusalem Post essay (via rcp) focuses attention on Tehran’s chief nut, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At a high school basketball game not too long ago an Iranian-American friend of mine told me about an article he had read in the Iranian press where Ahmadinejad said he “glowed with a halo” after delivering his speech at the UN. “It’s in Farsi,” my friend said.

Well, it’s in English now (and has been for a couple of weeks). Here’s how it appears in Pipes’ article:

On returning to Iran from New York, Ahmadinejad recalled the effect of his UN speech:

One of our group told me that when I started to say “In the name of God the almighty and merciful,” he saw a light around me, and I was placed inside this aura. I felt it myself. I felt the atmosphere suddenly change, and for those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink… And they were rapt. It seemed as if a hand was holding them there and had opened their eyes to receive the message from the Islamic republic.

The man is “mahdi” mad. Pipes explains:

Thanks to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, a new word has entered the political vocabulary: mahdaviat.

Not surprisingly, it’s a technical religious term. Mahdaviat derives from mahdi, Arabic for “rightly-guided one,” a major figure in Islamic eschatology. He is, explains the Encyclopedia of Islam, “the restorer of religion and justice who will rule before the end of the world.”

The concept originated in the earliest years of Islam and, over time, became particularly identified with the Shi’ite branch. Whereas “it never became an essential part of Sunni religious doctrine,” continues the encyclopedia, “Belief in the coming of the Mahdi of the Family of the Prophet became a central aspect of the faith in radical Shi’ism,” where it is also known as the return of the Twelfth Imam.

Mahdaviat means “belief in and efforts to prepare for the Mahdi.”…

Yes, he will soon have a bomb.

I’ll also call attention to an article by John Keegan appearing in today’s Daily Telegraph.

Keegan argues that Iran is a bigger nuclear threat than Saddam was (though we know this through hindsight):

Iran, moreover, does not seek such weapons for psychological reasons. It wants them for practical purposes, including, according to a statement by its new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former revolutionary guard, to “wipe Israel from the map”. Islamic extremists are, of course, given to blood-curdling rhetoric. Nevertheless, Iran’s record must cause not only the West but all Iran’s neighbours to take the threat seriously.

But what do we do, Mr. Keegan? Keegan says:

the West cannot simply let things drift. Military action by whatever agency cannot be written out, but will be a last resort. In the meantime, all means short of military action, including economic and political ostracism and economic sanctions, must be tried, together with the building of alternative oil pipelines to bypass the current routes of oil supply down the Gulf. And, of course, the intensification of anti-terrorist measures.

For if the West is considering military action, so are the ayatollahs. They are the sponsors of much of the insurgency in Iraq and suppliers of the insurgents’ weapons. They also have intimate links with most of the world’s worst terrorist organisations, including al-Qa’eda and Hezbollah. Iranians may well be the missing link for which MI5 is searching behind the July 7 bombings in London.

I think the best strategic response is to play to the mullahs’ biggest fear– internal democratic revolt, fostered by concerted international overt, covert, economic, and political action. Iran is the place where the people can do it.

I’ll stick with the concluding graf from my column:

The real solution is regime change in Tehran. The EU and the United States have talked about supporting the mullahs’ political opponents, but they have not walked that walk with sufficient financial aid, political support, media support and — yes, it may be necessary — weapons. Iran’s tyrants believe they can finesse diplomatic discourse and ride out a military strike. They fear they cannot quell a popular, pro-democracy rebellion.

UPDATE: Berlin, Paris, and London say the EU-Iran talks have reached a “dead end.”