Zakaria on Iran
Newsweek - September 11, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14640262/site/newsweek/
The Year of Living Fearfully
Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has gone from being an obscure and not-so-
powerful politician to a central player in the Mideast, simply by
goading the United States.
By Fareed Zakaria
It’s 1938, says the liberal columnist Richard Cohen, evoking images
of Hitler’s armies massing in the face of an appeasing West. No, no,
says Newt Gingrich, the Third World War has already begun.
Neoconservatives, who can be counted on to escalate, argue that we’re
actually in the thick of the Fourth World War. The historian Bernard
Lewis warned a few weeks ago that Iran’s president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, could be planning to annihilate Israel (and perhaps even
the United States) on Aug. 22 because it was a significant day for
Muslims.
Can everyone please take a deep breath?
To review a bit of history: in 1938, Adolf Hitler launched what
became a world war not merely because he was evil but because he was
in complete control of the strongest country on the planet. At the
time, Germany had the world’s second largest industrial base and its
mightiest army. (The American economy was bigger, but in 1938 its
army was smaller than that of Finland.) This is not remotely
comparable with the situation today.
Iran does not even rank among the top 20 economies in the world. The
Pentagon’s budget this year is more than double Iran’s total gross
domestic product ($181 billion, in official exchange-rate terms).
America’s annual defense outlay is more than 100 times Iran’s.
Tehran’s nuclear ambitions are real and dangerous, but its program is
not nearly as advanced as is often implied. Most serious estimates
suggest that Iran would need between five and 10 years to achieve
even a modest, North Korea-type, nuclear capacity.
Washington has a long habit of painting its enemies 10 feet tall—and
crazy. During the cold war, many hawks argued that the Soviet Union
could not be deterred because the Kremlin was evil and irrational.
The great debate in the 1970s was between the CIA’s wimpy estimate of
Soviet military power and the neoconservatives’ more nightmarish
scenario. The reality turned out to be that even the CIA’s lowest
estimates of Soviet power were a gross exaggeration. During the
1990s, influential commentators and politicians—most prominently the
Cox Commission—doubled the estimates of China’s military spending,
using largely bogus calculations. And then there was the case of
Saddam Hussein’s capabilities. Saddam, we were assured in 2003, had
nuclear weapons—and because he was a madman, he would use them.
One man who is greatly enjoying being the subject of this outsize
portraiture is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He has gone from being an obscure
and not-so-powerful politician—Iran is a theocracy, remember, so the
mullahs are ultimately in control—to a central player in the Middle
East simply by goading the United States and watching Washington take
the bait. By turning him into enemy No. 1, by reacting to every
outlandish statement he makes, the Bush administration has given him
far more attention than he deserves. And so now he writes letters to
Bush, offers to debate him and prances about in the global spotlight
provided by American attention.
Ahmadinejad strikes me as less a messianic madman and more a radical
populist, an Iranian Huey Long. He has outflanked the mullahs on the
right on nuclear policy, pushing for a more confrontationist approach
toward Washington. He has outflanked them on the left on women’s
rights, arguing against some of the prohibitions women face. (He
wants them to be able to attend soccer matches.) Almost every week he
announces a new program to “help the poor.” He uses the nuclear issue
because it gives him a great nationalist symbol. For a regime with
little to show after a quarter century in power—Iranian standards of
living have actually declined since the revolution—nuclear power is a
national accomplishment.
Even Ahmadinejad’s most grotesque statement, implying the
annihilation of Israel, is likely part of this pattern. Iran is
seeking leadership in the Middle East, and what better way to do so
than by appropriating the core grievance of the Sunni Arabs: Israel.
By making his dramatic statements, he is taunting the regimes of the
Arab world, using rhetoric they dare not, for fear of Washington. His
rhetoric is not so new; the Iranian “moderate” Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani
said similar things. The real shift that has taken place in the
Middle East is that 30 years ago most Arab regimes would have made
statements like Ahmadinejad’s. Today his “rejectionism” stands alone.
Iran is run by a nasty regime that destabilizes an important part of
the world, frustrates American and Western interests, and causes
problems for allies like Israel. But let’s get some perspective. The
United States is far more powerful than Iran. And, on the issue of
Tehran’s nuclear program, Washington is supported by most of the
world’s other major powers. As long as the alliance is patient,
united and smart—and keeps the focus on Tehran’s actions not
Washington’s bellicosity—the odds favor America. Ahmadinejad presides
over a country where more than 40 percent of the population lives
under the poverty line; his authority is contested, and Iran’s
neighbors are increasingly worried and have begun acting to counter
its influence. If we could contain the Soviet Union, we can contain
Iran. Look at your calendar: it’s 2006, not 1938.