Iran, Podhoretz declares, betraying
no trace of self-doubt, wants to acquire nuclear weapons in order to
destroy Israel. Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has "repeatedly
and unequivocally" announced Iran's intention to "wipe Israel off the
map." Not only that, Podhoretz avers (perhaps to deflect any suggestion
that he's narrowly concerned with Israel): Ahmadinejad cherishes "a
larger dream of extending the power and influence of Islam throughout
Europe, and this too he hopes to accomplish by playing on the fear that
resistance to Iran would lead to a nuclear war." "Islamization,"
analogous to Finlandization, is already well-advanced in Europe. This
will only get worse, Podhoretz charges (citing fellow neocon John
Bolton) with "Iranian nuclear blackmail." Moreover, Ahmadinejad wants a
"world without America." Thus the Iranian president and regime and
nuclear program must be eliminated through the deployment of U.S.
power.
Podhoretz has faith that this will happen, predicting
that Bush will "within the next 21 months. . . order air strikes
against the Iranian nuclear facilities from the three U.S. aircraft
carriers already sitting nearby. . ." Since Podhoretz has the ear of
very powerful people, this prophesy should set off alarm bells. (Notice
how the day after Podhoretz's piece appeared, International Atomic
Energy Agency director IAEA chief and Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Mohamed ElBaradei referred to "new crazies who say 'let's go and bomb
Iran,'" adding that he did not want to see another war like the one in
Iraq.) But the attack supplicant confesses some uncertainty on the
point, expressing concern that "the respectable tool of diplomacy"
(which he equates with craven appeasement) might win out over the
bombing option he urges. Sanctions alone, he emphasizes, will not bring
down the Iranian regime, and in any case, "there is simply no chance of
getting Russia and China, or the Europeans for that matter, to agree to
the kind of sanctions that are the necessary precondition" for regime
change
He suggests hopefully however (quoting yet another fellow
neocon, Robert Kagan) that in his less bellicose approaches to Iran
Bush is merely "giving futility its chance." (Several recent reports
suggest that Cheney is contemptuous of the limited diplomatic process
favored by Condi Rice and strongly backs a plan now in effect to
disseminate propaganda and disinformation about Iran, and sabotage some
of its currency and international financial transactions, preparatory
to the bombing plan the neocons have long favored and which remains on
track.)
In the background of Podhoretz's discussion is an
elegantly misleading periodization of recent history, borrowed from
Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins professor of Strategic Studies, who has
been called "the most influential neoconservative in academe."
(Ominously, Cohen was recently appointed by Condoleezza Rice as the new
Counselor of the State Department.) Over the last century there have
been four world wars. In World War II the U.S. fought against fascism.
In World War III (the term some neocons use for the Cold War) the U.S.
fought against communism. We are now in World War IV, fighting against
"Islamofascism." (Podhoretz does not define the "ism" at issue during
World War I, which might affect the model. I'd say it was imperialism
on both sides, neither of them worth supporting, and that imperialism's
been at the root of all these wars. )
Islamofascism, Podheretz
proclaims, is "yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we
defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape
of communism." Podhoretz does not identify the historical norm that
became diseased and generated these pathologies, but presumably it is
the bourgeois democracy that some see as the "end of History" to which
all humankind, cured of these diseases, will ultimately gravitate.
The
term "Islamofascism" has been around for a few decades, and no doubt
has some degree of analytical utility in some contexts. But the
neocons, and occasionally President Bush, have used it to refer to
Muslim targets as varied as the Syrian and Iraqi secular Baathist
states, the Iranian Shiite mullocracy, al-Qaeda cells, Palestinian
militias---few of which offer a good match for any mainstream academic
definition of fascism. The term is merely applied as an epithet, to
conflate disparate phenomena, and to validate the "war on terrorism" as
something analogous to World War II.
This historical model seems
to me a parody of the worst sort of crudely stage-ist "Marxist"
historiography. It abandons attention to historical detail and suspends
any requirement of logical analysis in favor of a triumphantalist
vision of the world as it will and must be: in this case, a world led
by America, arm-in-arm with an Israel finally freed of its foes through
a "final conflict." Organically linked evil "isms" follow one after
another, and drawing upon historical experience, "we" gloriously defeat
them. Podhoretz (born in 1930) wants to link the war on "Islamofascism"
to the Good War of his childhood (in its anti-fascist moral purity) and
to the Cold War (in its expected multigenerational duration).
But
one must really torture the facts to fit them into this paradigm and
requisite system of historical analogies. The neocon project requires
"regime change" throughout Southwest Asia, hence the vilification of
leaders of Muslim nations as contemporary avatars of the twentieth
century figure most universally regarded as both frightening and evil.
While Podhoretz's son John worked as a speechwriter for the first
President Bush, the latter depicted Saddam Hussein as "a new Hitler."
It was a preposterous analogy. Adolf Hitler had ruled one of the
world's most powerful nations, which had been a world leader in science
and industry from the 1880s and won and lost a colonial empire from
Tanganyika to Samoa. Saddam ruled a Third World country dependent on
foreign capital. Bushes I and II elevated this puny historical footnote
to unwarranted epic status.
There was no comparison, but the
first Bush administration insisted on conflating the two, deploying the
emotions of the past (or at least the confused historical memories of
the masses) to build the case for the first war on Iraq. This is a
hallmark of the neocons, who boast that they are "more interested in
history than economics or sociology"! What actually most interests them
about the historical record is the possibility of raiding it to procure
these false analogies that serve their objectives in the present.
"Deception is the norm in political life," Abram Shulsky (former Office
of Special Plans operative, now heading the "Iran Directorate" at the
Pentagon) wrote in 1999 in an essay entitled, "Leo Strauss and the
World of Intelligence," "and the hope, to say nothing of the
expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is
the exception."
Today's biggest deceptive analogy is between
Hitler and Ahmadinejad, and between the Munich Pact (signed between
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Hitler in 1938 following
the German annexation of the Sudetenland) and the possibility of
western acceptance of Iran's nuclear power program. Ahmadinejad,
declares Podhoretz, "like Hitler"
". . .is a revolutionary whose
objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace
it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled
by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism. Like Hitler, too, he
is entirely open about his intentions, although--again like Hitler--he
sometimes pretends that he wants nothing more than his country's just
due. In the case of Hitler in 1938, this pretense took the form of
claiming that no further demands would be made if sovereignty over the
Sudetenland were transferred from Czechoslovakia to Germany. In the
case of Ahmadinejad, the pretense takes the form of claiming that Iran
is building nuclear facilities only for peaceful purposes and not for
the production of bombs."
One needs to repeat over and over
again in the face of the latter assertion that the International Atomic
Energy Agency has found no evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons
program. The September 2005 vote of the IAEA representatives labeling
Iran in "non-compliance" with the Nonproliferation Treaty itself found
no evidence of a military program but rather accused Iran of having
concealed some nuclear activities. Of the 35 nations then serving on
the IAEA board, 13 voted against the September report or abstained from
voting The latter included highly significant countries like China,
Russia, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, Venezuela, Brazil, Pakistan,
Vietnam. The resolution promoted by the bullying neocon U.S. UN
Ambassador John Bolton passed because the NATO nations voted as a bloc.
Since
that vote, the U.S.---Vice President Cheney and the neocons in
particular---have relentlessly sought UN validation for an attack on
Iran. They have now obtained UNSC resolutions demanding that Iran stop
enriching uranium---something that the Non-Proliferation Treaty, of
which Iran (unlike nuclear Israel) is a signatory, guarantees as a
right to all signatory states. Iran's refusal to suspend enrichment
operations gives the attack advocates their rationale for answering
Podhoretz's prayer by the end of Bush's term in office.
To
demonstrate that Ahmadinejad has "repeatedly and unequivocally"
announced Iran's intention to "wipe Israel off the map," and is
"entirely open about his intentions," Podhoretz can do no better than
to recite the old tired canard about a speech the newly-elected Iranian
president gave on October 25th, 2005 in a conference hall in Tehran. He
quoted the Ayatollah Khomeini (who died in 1989): "The Imam said this
regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time. . .[Just
as] the Soviet Union disappeared, the Zionist regime will also vanish
and humanity will be liberated."
Recall how this story was
preceded by false reports in June and July 2005 about Ahmadinejad being
among the students who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. It
was followed in May 2006 by the story planted in Canada's National Post
about a plan by the Iranian Parliament to badge all Iranian Jews---an
obvious effort to depict the Iranian regime as a collection of
latter-day Nazis. It was entirely false---but this is the sort of
deception that Shulsky might regard as normative in political life.
What
of the argument that even if Iran had the bomb, and wanted to wipe out
the Jewish state, it would be constrained from doing so by "mutually
assured destruction"? Podhoretz scornfully rejects this, citing at
length a statement by Bernard Lewis, whom he calls "the greatest
authority of our time on the Islamic world," and whom others consider
"perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the
invasion of Iraq."
The late great Edward Said described
Lewis's writings on Muslim history as "ppropaganda against his subject
material," adding that his work is "aggressively ideological" and
constitutes a "project to debunk, to whittle down, and to discredit the
Arabs and Islam. . ." especially before "conservative segments of the
Jewish reading public, and anyone else who cares to listen. . ."
MAD, writes Lewis as cited by Podheretz
".
. . will not work with a religious fanatic [like Ahmadinejad]. For him,
mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We
know already that [Iran's leaders] do not give a damn about killing
their own people in great numbers. We have seen it again and again. In
the final scenario, and this applies all the more strongly if they kill
large numbers of their own people, they are doing them a favor. They
are giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all its delights."
I
expect that choice little quote will circulate widely in the coming
months, along with the broader argument that Muslims are indifferent to
human life, including their own. (Recall Gen. Westmoreland's comment at
the height of Vietnam War savagery: "Orientals don't place the same
value on human life as we do," and former Attorney General Ashcroft's
remark, "Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for
you, [while Islam is] a religion in which God requires you to send your
son to die for him.")
What is the evidence for this judgment on
the Iranian mentality? The following statement by former Iranian
President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani: "If a day comes when the world
of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in [its] possession
. . . application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel,
but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world." "In
other words," Podhoretz comments, "Israel would be destroyed in a
nuclear exchange, but Iran would survive." (Podhoretz by the way
mentions nothing of the nuclear arsenal with which Muslim Pakistan is
already duly equipped.)
It seems to me however that Rafsanjani's
matter-of-fact observation is of the sort any of us could make, perhaps
in the context of arguing that Israel would not likely use its nukes
against a Muslim target if it feared its own destruction. (Of course,
someone might in response want to talk about the "Masada complex,"
impute it to Jewish or Israeli leaders generally and argue that such
people "do not give a damn about killing their own people in great
numbers." But in our society such talk would meet with immediate,
appropriate condemnation. In expressing their assessment of the Iranian
leaders, Lewis and Podhoretz don't seem to fear or expect censure.)
It's
no secret that the Iranian regime considers the Jewish state
illegitimate, created by settlers at the expense of the indigenous
Palestinian people. Ahmadinejad apparently believes that it will not
exist forever. (Benjamin Netanyahu for his part has warned out the
"demographic threat" to the Jewish state posed by the high Arab
birthrate. Many people think it likely that some sort of secular
multi-cultural state will emerge within Israel's borders sometime in
the future; it's called "the single-state solution.") Ahmadinejad in
the same speech noted how the Soviet Union, the Shah's regime, and
Saddam Hussein's regime had all vanished and predicted that Israel
would too. He did not remotely suggest that Iran planned to attack
Israel to make that happen.
Iran does of course support
anti-Israeli Lebanese and Palestinian militias produced by occupation,
and so Podhoretz can depict it as both terrorist and a threat to
Israel. But he might have mentioned that in April or May 2003 Iran sent
a diplomatic message to Washington indicating its willingness to accept
the March 2002 "Arab League Beirut declaration," which it also referred
to as the "Saudi initiative, two-states approach" in exchange for
improved relations with the United States. (Cheney and the neocons
treated that overture with contempt! As Cheney has said, "We don't
negotiate with evil. We defeat it.")
Podhoretz makes it clear
that not just Israel but the entire world should fear nefarious Iran.
Not skipping a beat, he declares, "Ahmadinejad's ambitions are not
confined to the destruction of Israel. He also wishes to dominate the
greater Middle East Nor are Ahmadinejad's ambitions merely regional in
scope. He has a larger dream of extending the power and influence of
Islam throughout Europe, and this too he hopes to accomplish by playing
on the fear that resistance to Iran would lead to a nuclear war." (This
is a repetition of the alarmist charge that some Muslims seek to
reconstitute a Caliphate, extending from Spain to Indonesia, and in
these times enjoy the remotest possibility for doing so.)
Actually
Ahmadinejad's foreign "ambitions" are not well-known. He talks about a
global Islamic revolution, rather like Bush talks grandly about
bringing "democracy" to the world. In any case, within the Iranian
political system, he's not the key player in determining a foreign
policy that strikes me as in fact rather pragmatic and cautious. He's
the elected president of a country that has not attacked another in
modern times. Does he wish for greater influence of Islam throughout
Europe? That's safe to say; he's a devout Muslim after all. Don't
American Christian fundamentalists, whom the secularist neocons
carefully cultivate, want to evangelize Europe (and Israel for that
matter)? Wouldn't Bush like to extend the power and influence of his
brand of fundamentalism everywhere?
The power of Islam (mostly
Sunni Islam) is extending in Europe, to be sure, for reasons that have
little to do with Iran but lots to do with the legacy of European
colonialism, especially in North Africa and South Asia, and the high
birthrate among European Muslims. It has to do with resurgent
religiosity among Muslims in the Balkans, and perhaps financial support
for mosques from Saudi Arabia, the center of global Sunni Islam (and no
great friend of Shiite Iran). Surely it has to do with the intrinsic
attraction some people (unfortunately) feel towards a severely
monotheistic patriarchal faith based on what believers regard as the
Word of God, imposing numerous rules on the faithful and promising
Paradise or Hell in the afterlife. In any case, the spread of Islam in
general scares some people, and plainly Podhoretz would like to exploit
their fears.
Ahmadinejad wants "a world without America," writes
Podhoretz. That was the theme of a conference in Iran in 2004, where
the deputy chief of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Baqer Zol Qadr,
explained, "When we talk about the 'World Without America,' we mean a
world governed by peace and justice.... Unfortunately, today America is
the symbol of these deficiencies and distortions." No Iranian official
to my knowledge has suggested that Iran wants to blow America off the
map. This is more fear-mongering on Podhoretz's part, a subtler version
of the alarmist "mushroom cloud over New York" imagery that preceded
the criminal attack on Iraq.
Podhoretz in accordance with his
fascism-communism---Islamofascism framework compares those who do not
share his alarm and bellicosity not only with the appeasers of Hitler's
Germany but with the Cold War-era U.S. "foreign policy establishment"
which was soft on the Soviet Union. He states that during the Cold War,
"some of us feared that the Soviets might seize control of the oil
fields of the Middle East, and that the West, faced with a choice
between surrendering to their dominance or trying to stop them at the
risk of a nuclear exchange, would choose surrender. In that case, we
thought, the result would be what in those days went by the name of
Finlandization."
This is perhaps the most bizarre portion of the
op-ed, and makes it clear why the neocons parted company with the
rational "establishment." Of course in a warfare situation the Soviets
might have made a grab for the Middle Eastern oil fields then
controlled by the west, and the west would probably have put up a
fight. But who do these fields belong to anyway, and why should one
have assumed that the petroleum-rich and generally cautious Soviet
Union was just waiting for its opportunity to provoke (real) world war
by an effort to seize them?
"Finlandization" refers to the
subservience of a small country to a powerful neighboring one. One
could talk about the Finlandization of Latin American countries
vis-à-vis the U.S., but the Finlandization of the U.S. superpower due
to actions by the USSR? It was very possible, thinks Podhoretz. "In
Europe, where there were large Communist parties, Finlandization would
take the form of bringing these parties to power so that they could
establish 'red Vichy' regimes like the one already in place in
Finland--regimes whose subservience to the Soviet will in all things,
domestic and foreign alike, would make military occupation unnecessary
and would therefore preserve a minimal degree of national
independence." (Actually I don't think that fairly describes Finland
between 1945 and 1991.)
Podhoretz continues: as for "the
United States, where there was no Communist Party to speak of, we
[neoconservatives] speculated that Finlandization would take a subtler
form," that politicians frightened by the Soviets "would arise to
celebrate the arrival of a new era of peace and friendship in which the
Cold War policy of containment would be scrapped, [and]. . . the only
candidates running for office with a prayer of being elected would be
those who promised to work toward a sociopolitical system more in
harmony with the Soviet model than the unjust capitalist plutocracy
under which we had been living." But thank God, writes Podhoretz, this
nightmare scenario never materialized: "Of course, by the grace of God,
the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain and Ronald Reagan, we won World
War III and were therefore spared the depredations that Finlandization
would have brought."
This "speculation" segues interestingly
into an attack on contemporary British virility (perhaps an implicit
message to Bush to really act like a man). The United Kingdom,
Podhoretz claims (citing fellow neocon and former U.S. UN ambassador
John Bolton), shows signs of Finlandization in its handling of the
arrest last month of 15 British sailors and marines in disputed waters.
Blair's failure to attack Iran was a humiliating "show of impotence,"
Podhoretz claims. The Iranians "held [British sailors] hostage"
(something London itself did not claim), and now Ahmadinejad can "reap
the additional benefit of, as the British commentator Daniel Johnson
puts it, 'posing as a benefactor' by releasing the hostages, even while
ordering more attacks in Iraq and even while continuing to arm
terrorist organizations, whether Shiite (Hezbollah) or Sunni (Hamas)."
Podhoretz states that Iran is "obviously" doing this although many
commentators have noted the lack of hard evidence for such support.
Then
out of the blue, Podhoretz refers to the cancellation of some classes
on the Holocaust in Britain given the supposed opposition to them by
Muslims in the UK ". . . whose beliefs include Holocaust denial." The
only internet support for this assertion I can find is a Daily Mail
report that a study of the Department for Education and Skills released
in April "found some teachers are dropping courses covering the
Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears Muslim pupils might
express anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions in class." This for
Podhoretz constitutes evidence of "Islamization" that will only worsen
if Iran is not bombed. The logical connection is absolutely unclear.
The
conclusion? In this long World War against the Islamofascists, who are
abetted by Finlandizing proponents of "Islamization," President Bush
(whom John Podhoretz calls "the first great leader of the twenty-first
century") must bomb Iran---to protect Israel, America and the world.
Given Chinese and Russian complacency, and European wimpiness, Bush
alone can save the world from Iran, and soon.
"It now remains to
be seen whether this president, battered more mercilessly and with less
justification than any other in living memory, and weakened politically
by the enemies of his policy in the Middle East in general and Iraq in
particular, will find it possible to take the only action that can stop
Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and
toward Israel. As an American and as a Jew, I pray with all my heart
that he will."
I can only hope with all my heart that this kind
of thinking receives the refutation, rejection and marginalization it
deserves---from all kinds of Americans.
* * * * *
I
personally see no World War here--Three or Four or otherwise---but a
Wild Wager. The world's most reckless gambler sits at the table,
playing Texas Hold 'Em. At his elbow are his recent winnings:
Afghanistan and Iraq. But he can't take them home yet and may very well
yet lose them. In his sights lie Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan.
Since 9-11 he's cherished the desire to reshuffle the cards. His greed
is boundless. Behind him sit supporters eager to share his winnings,
biting their nails nervously, praying he'll win the whole pot and maybe
inclined if he doesn't to tip over the table. Crazy people.
Writings 
Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of Commentary magazine and (with Irving Kristol) one of the grandfathers of the neoconservative movement, recently published an op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal that literally constitutes a prayer for President Bush to attack Iran. 
Subscribe to this comment's feed
