Say what you want about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but “he knows how to work a room.” So claims Flynt Leverett, the contrarian Iran analyst who, with his wife Hillary Mann Leverett, paid a visit to the Iranian president in New York City last fall. During the sit-down at Manhattan’s InterContinental Barclay hotel with a group of invited academics, foreign policy professionals, and other Iranophiles, the Leveretts marveled at Ahmadinejad’s attention to detail as the Iranian took copious notes and strove to pronounce their unfamiliar names correctly.
The New Republic is live-blogging news of events in Iran today, on the eve of 22 Bahman (February 11), the anniversary of Iran’s 1979 revolution. The Iranian opposition movement is slated to co-opt the state's annual rallies to stage another mass demonstration--the largest since December's violent protests on the Shiite holy day of Ashura.
The ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has provided Latin America with a revelatory moment. Beginning with the Monroe Doctrine--and extending through countless invasions, occupations, and covert operations--Washington has considered the region its backyard. So where was this superpower these past few months, as Honduras hung in the balance? More or less sitting on its hands. The fact is that the United States is no longer willing, or perhaps even able, to select who governs from Tegucigalpa, or anywhere else in the region for that matter. Looking back at the history of the hemisphere, this fact is remarkable--and certainly transformative. For the first time in centuries, the United States doesn’t seem to care much what happens in Latin America.
As President Obama arrives empty-handed at the end of his year-long attempt to persuade Iran to address the international community’s concerns about its nuclear program, a curious paradox has emerged. Even if intensified--and highly costly--sanctions were to force the regime to comply with Western demands, an agreement between Tehran and Washington would benefit one party above all: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the illegitimate government that he now leads.
I am as worldly as the next dreamer, but the scales fell from my eyes, the same ones that keep finding their way back to my eyes, when I opened The New Yorker a few weeks ago and found, in a portfolio of “portraits of power,” Mussolini’s full-page face piggishly staring at me in chicly lurid detail, the very emblem of brutality made aesthetically acceptable. And when I turned the page there was Franco, in full generalissimo kit gazing coldly forward, every hair on his heartless mustache uncannily vivid in a miracle of photographic verisimilitude. Is nobody any longer beyond the pale? Is moral judgment now bad form? Is repugnance a thing of the past? I’m lying, of course. Neither Mussolini nor Franco appeared in The New Yorker’s exciting feature. But Ahmadinejad, Mugabe, Chávez, and Qaddafi did. They were shot--sorry, I’m dreaming again--they were photographed by Platon at the United Nations in September, where, according to an unsigned editor’s note, he set up a little studio not far from the General Assembly. “For months, members of the magazine’s staff had been writing letters to various governments and embassies”--imagine some of those letters!--“but the project was a five-day-long improvisation, with Platon doing his best to lure the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chávez, and Muammar Qaddafi to his camera.” I guess Omar Al Bashir was out of town. The photographer made things worse with an unbelievable audio account of the adventure. “To get Chávez was a big, big deal,” he exulted. And “Ahmadinejad is, believe it or not, a very childlike man. He’s short, shorter than me, I think. He giggles like a little boy. I didn’t want to paint a caricature of him: tough and mean. I wanted to show this irony that there’s an innocence about his eyes. So that’s what this picture is about.” Actually, that’s not what this picture is about. It is a perfectly familiar photo that conveys, in unfascinating close-up, only the sitter’s trademark smirk. The picture is about the art of the get, and nothing more. The editor’s note compares Platon’s project to Avedon--and alludes to Velázquez, like any undergraduate discussion of portraits of power--but these pictures display none of Avedon’s revelations, or interpretations, in portraiture. Avedon’s distortions were at least the evidence of a temperament; but there is no temperament in Platon’s people, there is just a pushy frontality and a phony intimacy, as if you capture a person when you capture his pores. These pictures are exercises in a stylized neutrality, a willful indifference to everything we know about their subjects. There is not “an innocence” about Ahmadinejad’s eyes, or ears, or nose. He is, in his every detail, guilty. He represses his society and subjugates its women and shoots its young people and steals its elections and threatens to incinerate another country. Fuck his giggle.
With no signs of cooperation from Tehran and Obama's year-end deadline approaching, the administration is pushing for new sanctions against Iran starting in January. For a better understanding of the sanctions situation, check out these recent TNR pieces:
In "Over a Barrel," David Makovsky and Ed Morse argue that the current sanctions being considered are unlikely to have much effect:
Francisco Toro and Juan Nagel write the Venezuelan news blog Caracas Chronicles.
The Honduran crisis surely reached its Rococo stage this week after fresh elections organized by the coupsters' regime saw the election of a conservative rancher as president—while Brazil's nearly sainted left-wing president, Lula da Silva, promptly rejected the poll as undemocratic ... a scant few days after welcoming Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Brazil with open arms.
The election of President Lobo has split the international community, and in mostly predictable ways. His victory has been recognized by the U.S., Peru, Panama, Colombia, and Japan, while Spain has announced it will soon re-visit its tough stance. The region's left-wing governments, however, remain staunchly opposed to recognizing any election tinged by association with June's coup.
Brazil is now leading the guys with the pitchforks, a group that includes Argentina's Cristina Kirchner, Chile's Michelle Bachelet, and the OAS, alongside such shining exemplars of democratic principle as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and the Castro brothers in Cuba. The problem for this group is that Lobo's election comes with the real legitimacy of a vote that was mandated by Honduras’s constitution and had been scheduled and planned long before June's coup. What's more, despite calls for a boycott by deposed president Mel Zelaya, Sunday saw turnout top 60%--slightly higher than the turnout five years ago, when Zelaya himself was elected, and about the same level of participation that saw Barack Obama elected in the U.S. last year.
Almost three decades ago, a group of radical Islamist students, dressed in army fatigues or covered in scarves and black chadors, forced their way into the American embassy in Tehran. According to some accounts, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then a student at a second-tier technical college in Tehran, was invited to join the hostage takers. He declined, saying he would join only if they would also occupy the Soviet embassy in Tehran. “No to the West, No to the East” was in those days the much-touted slogan of the regime.
Last week, I wrote about a panel at the inaugural convention of the self-described "pro-Israel, pro-peace" organization J Street, in which former Bush NSC staffer Hillary Mann Leverett said the following:
Toughened by their frontier ethos, steeled by serial wars, Israelis are not prone to flattery. Most, in fact, eschew using the closest equivalent to the Hebrew word for flattery--chanupa--in favor of the derisive Yiddish-derivative, firgun. An Israeli joke holds that the word, slashed by a red diagonal line, graces the exit from Ben-Gurion Airport, together with the warning, "You are now entering a Firgun Free Zone."
The Iranian regime has made headlines this week with its announcement that it will allow inspections into its recently discovered enrichment site in Qom, and its agreement, albeit ambiguously, to allow enrichment to be handled by Russia or France. Less covered, but actually more important, are recent statements from the Iranian opposition against the nuclear weapons program--warning Western leaders not to be fooled by Ahmdinejad’s latest concessions, and actually offering a viable alternative to solve the current nuclear standoff.
It's been a long year--Barack Obama has faced, in rough order, John McCain, global financial collapse, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Blue Dogs, the Progressive Caucus, the Gang of Six, Glenn Beck, Representative Joe Wilson (R-Hissy), and the third of Republicans convinced he was born somewhere else. Of course, minus the birth certificates, roughly the same has been true for Hu Jintao and Nicolas Sarkozy, for Angela Merkel and Manmohan Singh. That's what politics is--a series of challenges, which are rarely won or lost completely. You get part of what you wanted (everyone with health insurance), and maybe you leave other stuff for another day (the public option). That's why we call politics the pursuit of the possible.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was back in New York this week, making his fifth annual pilgrimage to the UN General Assembly. In the past, Ahmadinejad's carefully calibrated theatrics before or during his trips--comparable only to his new soul-mate Hugo Chavez, or the equally delusional, self-declared messiah, Moammar Qaddafi--focused all attention on the regime's nuclear adventurism, or his own shameless denial of the Holocaust and repeated demands for Israel's "oblivion from the map." His glib sound bites were broadcast with astonishing repetition. Journalists, with occasional exceptions, eschewed more probing questions about the failing economy in Iran and the plight of political prisoners and minorities.
The announcement that Iran has been constructing a covert facility to enrich nuclear fuel for the last few years without notifying the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) raises the stakes for the upcoming October 1 meeting of six leading countries with Iran. The underground facility is located on an Iranian Revolutionary Guard base outside the religious city of Qom.
I don't know how many head-of-state nut cases arrived in New York for the annual meetings of the United Nations General Assembly. But surely there are many others besides Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Muamar Gaddafi. There is a class of rulers from Africa, for example, who govern recklessly in behalf of themselves but under the cover of one or another form of millenarianism. (The brutal clowns of South America are a bit different. They still believe that Fidel Castro is a model for building the good society.) This is, I suppose, the revenge of ideology over the London School of Economics.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a joke, the realists say. Yes, a laugh a minute. How possibly could he be serious that the twentieth century catastrophe of the Jewish people never happened! Everybody knows the opposite. O.K. Except that more and more people--alas, evidently including President Obama--believe it happened ... and that the Palestinians paid the price for it. An eye for an eye.
At the UN this week, President Obama will finally move closer to closing the notorious "enrichment loophole"—a monstrous oversight written into the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that allowed North Korea and Iran to pursue nuclear-arms programs while insisting that their efforts were simply peaceful civilian research.
The U.N. General Assembly opens today for its 64th session--and it looks like it will be more exciting than most. Obama is planning theatrics to advance his ambitious international agenda, while everyone from Muammar Qaddafi to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be maneuvering for maximum effect. Click through this slideshow for a look at some of this session's must-see events.
The U.N. General Assembly opens today for its 64th session--and it looks like it will be more exciting than most. Obama is planning theatrics to advance his ambitious international agenda, while everyone from Muammar Qaddafi to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be maneuvering for maximum effect. Click through this slideshow for a look at some of this session's must-see events.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "From our point of view, Iran's nuclear issue is over." Meaning: No negotiations. Meaning Obama must now decide whether he really wants to pursue those "crippling" sanctions. Watch to see whether the White House gives a green light to Congress to move on sanctions aimed at Iran's gasoline industry later this month.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad like to blame the uprising in Iran on outside influences. They particularly like to point their fingers at the British and the Americans, along with a requisite nod in the direction of the Zionists--a time-honored pretext for avoiding blame for discontent in their country. But, for all the phantom rabble-rousers, there’s one outside influence that has actually helped shape events: the Falun Gong.
To most metropolitan Americans, the Falun Gong are the yellow-shirt-wearing adherents of a Chinese religious sect who hand out flyers on street corners. Those flyers describe the group’s struggle against the Chinese government, which has banned the Falun Gong and subjected its members to organ-harvesting, electroshock therapy, and gulags. But, as the Chinese have escalated their efforts to stamp out the Falun Gong, the group has grown ever savvier in outwitting its oppressors. And it was the protestors in Iran who benefited from this savvy.
During his August 3 speech formally endorsing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned protesters that “by imitation of Ayatollah Khomeini, they cannot deceive people.” Khamenei was mocking the opposition’s claim to be to reviving “the values of Ayatollah Khomeini”--the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Khamenei’s predecessor as Supreme Leader. Ironically, Khamenei made this statement while seated below a large, framed picture of Khomeini.
To confront Iran, the United States must first confront Europe--and more specifically, the continent's powerful business lobby. This confrontation will come into focus in the next months. As Iran refuses Barack Obama's open-handed offer of engagement, the administration will turn towards sanctioning the Islamic Republic. And while there are surely ways in which the United States can tighten the economic screws on the Mullahs, it is Europe that has a much livelier trading relationship with Iran. In fact, Iran is far more economically dependent on Europe than even China and Russia.
May 23rd: Tehran's Azadi Indoor Stadium, 20 days before the election. The press had difficulty getting in the gates. "All full," the guards kept telling us. And full it was, overflowing in fact, for a Mir Hossein Mousavi campaign rally. Mousavi wasn't even there. Instead, the rally featured former President Mohammad Khatami and Mousavi's wife, Zahra Rahnavard, and the eager crowd numbered more than 20,000. I couldn't make my way to the VIP section, and I didn't want to.
