Martin Amis: The end of Iran's ayatollahs?

Martin Amis: The end of Iran's ayatollahs?

In 1979, the return to Iran of an exiled cleric marked the start of the Islamic Republic. The death in June of Neda Soltan may herald the long-overdue fall of this moribund regime.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday 20 July 2009.

An essay exploring whether Iran's Islamic republic is in its death throes – referred to President Jimmy Carter's "failed Entebbe raid of April 1980" to rescue US hostages in Iran. The failed 1980 mission was Operation Eagle Claw. The rescue of airline passengers at Entebbe, Uganda, was carried out with almost complete success by the Israeli military in July 1976.

The writer Jason Elliot called his recent and resonant Iranian travelogue Mirrors of the Unseen; and I am aware of the usual dangers associated with writing about the future. But what we seem to be witnessing in Iran is the first spasm of the death agony of the Islamic Republic. In this process, which will be very long and very ugly, Mir Hossein Mousavi is likely to play a lesser role than Neda Agha Soltan, whose transformation (from youth, hope, and beauty, in a matter of seconds, to muddy death) unforgettably crystallised the core Iranian idea – the Shia tragedy and passion – of martyrdom in the face of barbaric injustice. Neda Soltan personified something else, too: the modern.

Elliot's title should again be borne in mind as we consider the June Events, which are open to two interpretations. Quite possibly, things are more or less as they appear: the results of a fraudulent election were presented to the people with indecent haste and laughable incompetence (with, in other words, implicit contempt for democracy); civil unrest was then followed by the application of state violence. Now consider. If, after the usual interval, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had soberly announced a 51% win for President Ahmadinejad, then Iran, and the world, might well have bowed its head and moved on. Just as possibly (the Islamic Republic being what it is), the landslide was rigged, and ostentatiously vaunted, to bring on the terror and the crackdown.

In 1997, the regime felt confident enough to sanction the surprise victory of President Muhammad Khatami, who won by the same landslide margin of 69% in a joyous election that no one disputed. Khatami, a cleric, had nonetheless far stronger liberal credentials than the technocrat Mousavi (who, during the Iran-Iraq war, was well to the right of Khamenei). Lovingly hailed as "Ayatollah Gorbachev", Khatami was soon talking about the "thoughtful dialogue" he hoped to open with America. It seemed possible that international isolation, which so parches and de-oxygenates the Iranian air, was about to be eased.

Everyone understood that this process would take time. In June 2001, Khatami was re-elected with a majority of 78%. Seven months later came George W Bush's "axis of evil" speech (one of the most destructive in American history), and the Tehran Spring was at an end. In truth, Bush was heaven-sent for the Iranian right; he blindly enhanced its regional power (with the adventurist, indeed experimental, war with Iraq), while remaining adequately "arrogant" (the most detested of all attributes in the Shia-Iranian sensorium). Now, the mullahs are aware that Barack Obama is far cannier than that. Had Mousavi won, Obama would have rewarded Iran, and in a way palpable to all Iranians. Such a "linkage" – liberalisation equals benefits – would have fatal consequences for the mullahs. The earth has already stirred beneath them, with the pro-western, anti-Syrian, anti-Iranian election in Lebanon. This, together with certain historical forces, explains the current confusion and hysteria of the armed clerisy.

For the mullahs now know that they are afloat on an ocean of illegitimacy. The great hawsers of the revolution of 1978-79 are all either snapped or fraying. Of the four foundational narratives, three are myths: the "Islamic Revolution" was not an Islamic revolution; the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), which destroyed a generation, was not the "Imposed War", as it is still called; and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was not a great man (Khomeini, as every inquisitive Iranian has long understood, was a world-historical monster). Perhaps most importantly of all, for now, the fourth narrative, or thread (anti-Americanism – "Westoxication", in the old battle cry), has been severed by the person of Obama. The Islamic Republic is also doomed by modernity (in the form of instant communications) and by demographic destiny. Persia, one of the oldest nations on earth, is getting younger and younger.

"In the history of the Iranian plateau," writes Sandra Mackey, in her stylish and magisterial classic, The Iranians: Persia, Islam, and the Soul of a Nation, "the sun has risen and set on nearly a million days." But before we come to the Iranian soul, and the million days, let us examine the Three Lies about the Islamic Republic.

The 1979 revolution wasn't an Islamic revolution until it was over. In its origins, it was a full-spectrum mass movement, an avalanche of demonstrations and riots, and strikes so relentless that they blacked out the Peacock's palace; the military, moreover, was sustaining a thousand defections per day. The June Events of 2009 constitute a mere whisper of demurral when set against the deafening crescendo of 1978. The noise was not made for clerical rule; the noise was made because a decadent monarchy had lost the farr – the inherent aura of kingship.

It is instructive to compare the Iranian revolution with the two Russian revolutions of 1917: the February revolution, a popular revolt, and the October revolution, a Leninist coup (with an impotent Provisional Government in the interim). Trotsky said that the Bolsheviks found power lying in the street and "picked it up like a feather". And then, of course, the really warm work began – against the Whites, against the Greens (the peasantry), against the trade unions, against the church, and so on, until every alternative centre of power (and opinion) was eradicated, down to and including any gathering of three.

On 16 January 1979, Muhammad Reza Shah flew out of Tehran – to exile in Cairo. On 1 February, Ayatollah Khomeini flew into Tehran – from exile in Paris (where one of his more regrettable neighbours, I feel obliged to mention, was Brigitte Bardot). Thus the political revolution was over; now the cultural revolution began. The Provisional Government was successively eroded by the komitehs (mosque-based militias, later the Basij), by the Revolutionary Guards (later the Pasdaran, or the Iranian army), and by the revolutionary tribunals (which dealt out rough justice to survivors of the old regime, and various other undesirables). On 4 November, a group of pious students spontaneously infiltrated the US embassy and seized the 53 hostages. Khomeini manipulated this V-sign directed at the Great Satan to such effect that in the imminent referendum on the new constitution "99.5%" of a turnout of 17 million gave their blessing to Islamic autocracy.

But there was still that "0.5" to deal with. And Khomeini faced vigorous opposition from almost every quarter – most formidably from the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Established a decade and a half earlier, in opposition to the Shah, the Mujahedin (Marxist, left-Islamic, and committed to women's rights) had half a million adherents and could field a guerrilla army of 100,000 experienced fighters. When Khomeini excluded them from the new political order as "un-Islamic", they turned to terror. In 1981, if you recall, the Mujahedin were blowing up mullahs by the dozen (74 in a single strike in Tehran); and they went on to assassinate more than a thousand government officials in the latter months of that year. What followed was terroristic civil strife. By September, Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards were executing 50 people a day for "waging war against God" (the same crime, and the same punishment, now being invoked by the clerics of 2009). Fired by a zeal both revolutionary and religious, the mullahs bloodily prevailed.

Revolutions, almost by definition, are fiercely anti-clerical. As late as 1922, to take the fiercest possible example, Lenin executed 4,500 priests and monks, plus 3,500 nuns. Contrarian Iran, however, swam upstream. By December 1982, Khomeini had more or less secured the monopoly of violence, and the Iranian people found themselves living under the world's only revolutionary theocracy. The Islamic Republic was Islamic, now, but it was no longer a republic. Iranians have since enjoyed only a shadow of popular sovereignty; and by 1982, besides, they had something else to think about – the meatgrinding confrontation with Iraq.

The Iran-Iraq war can rightly be thought of as the Imposed War, but only if we understand that the war was imposed by Khomeini. It tests the historical imagination to get a sense of the horrified dismay engendered, throughout the region, by the advent of the meshuga ayatollah. Stalin, after a while, was content with "socialism in one country". Khomeini, proclaimedly, wanted Shia theocracy in every country on earth. Throughout the course of the Iran-Iraq war, Khomeini put himself about elsewhere, with bombings, assassination attempts, and armed subversion, in Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. In Mecca, the hajj became the scene of annual agitation; in 1987, a clash between Iranian militiamen and Saudi riot police left more than 400 dead.

And Iraq? In 1979 Saddam Hussein reached out a trembling hand of friendship to the new Iran, and was clearly hoping for the continuation of the detente he had established with the Shah. Iran responded by resuming support for the separatist Kurds (suspended since 1975) and for the Shia underground; there were assassination attempts on the deputy premier and the minister of information, and the successful murder of at least 20 prominent officials in April 1980 alone. Khomeini, meanwhile, withdrew his ambassador from Baghdad; in September, Iran shelled the border cities of Khanaqin and Mandali.

In The Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988, Efraim Karsh lists in his chronology eight Iraqi offers of ceasefires, the first on 5 October 1980, 12 days after the war began, the last on 13 July 1988, five weeks before it ended. Khomeini's war aim was the theocratisation, or de-Satanisation, of Iraq; thus the war became a (failed) test of Islam, and devolved, in Mackey's words, into "a daily enactment of Shia themes of sacrifice, dispossession, and mourning". So: 12-year-olds were attacking Iraqi machine gun emplacements on bicycles, and 750,000 Iranians filled the multi-acre cemeteries, and perhaps twice that number were left crippled in body or mind. Eleven months later, Khomeini himself joined the fallen in the land of the dead.

What remains, then, you might wonder, as you deplane at Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport, and enter a city where no cab-driver will stop for a cleric – what remains of the legacy bequeathed by the Father of the Revolution, or alternatively by "that fucking asshole", as he is reflexively called, in English, by the youth of the cities of Iran? Khomeini's notion of the Velayat-e Faqih, or rule by the vice-regent of God (ie, the top mullah, ie, Khomeini), was so unhistorical that many of its angriest opponents came from the clergy. Political participation, in Shia theology, is seen as a contaminant. And with good reason: that power corrupts is not a metaphor; and absolute power, combined with absolute self-righteousness, defined the insane nightmare of Khomeini's rule.

His moral imbecilities provide a rich field. I will confine myself to two examples. After President Carter's "fiasco in the desert", the failed Entebbe raid of April 1980, Khomeini announced that God had personally thrown sand into the helicopters' engines, to protect the nation of Islam. To hear this kind of talk from an eight-year-old is one thing; to hear it from a bellicose head of state, on public radio, is another. The second example comes from Mackey (the time is 1981):

A film run on government-controlled television showed a mother denouncing her son as a Marxist. The son, sobbing and grabbing for his mother's hand, desperately tries to convince her that he has given up Marxist politics. The mother rejects his pleas saying, "You must repent in front of God and you will be executed." The picture fades to Ayatollah Khomeini telling the people of Iran, "I want to see more mothers turning in their children with such courage without shedding a tear. This is what Islam is."

Well, it may or may not be what Islam is. But it is not what Iranians are.

* * *

Iran is one of the most venerable civilisations on earth: it makes China look like an adolescent, and America look like a stripling. And its 2,500-year history is sliced almost exactly in two by the rise of Islam. Accordingly, the Iranian heart is bipolar, divided between Xerxes and Muhammad, between Persepolis and Qom, between the imperially sensuous (with its luxury and poetry) and the unsmilingly pious. You will, I think, acknowledge that dividedness when I tell you that the author of this quietly beautiful quatrain –

I am a supplicant for a goblet of wine

From the hand of a sweetheart.

In whom can I confide this secret of mine,

Where can I take this sorrow?

– is the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Not Ferdowsi, not Rumi, not Hafez, not Omar Khayyam: Khomeini. It is perhaps the most beguiling single feature of Iranian life that its people go on pilgrimages, not only to the shrines of their martyrs and imams, but also to the shrines of their poets. The Iranian-Persian soul resembles the goddess Proserpina in Ted Hughes's masterly Tales from Ovid –

Proserpina, who divides her year

Between her husband in hell, among spectres,

And her mother on earth, among flowers.

Her nature, too, is divided. One moment

Gloomy as hell's king, but the next

Bright as the sun's mass, bursting from clouds.

In 1935, Iranians found themselves living in a different country – not Persia but Iran, the specifically pre-Islamic "land of the Arians". This was the work of Reza Shah (the army strongman who seized the throne in 1925). Reza Shah was a modernist and seculariser – Iran's Ataturk or Nasser. He was also a friend of Nazi Germany (and was deposed by the Allies in 1941). In 1976, Iranians found themselves living in a different millennium, not 1355 (dated from the time of the Prophet) but 2535 (dated from the time of Cyrus the Great). This was the work of Reza Shah's son. Installed by the coup of 1953 (the west's very grave historical crime, whose disastrous consequences are still with us), Muhammad Reza Shah was a "miserable wretch", as Khomeini rightly called him; but he was quite closely attuned to Iran's divided self. Reza Shah beat women who wore the veil; Khomeini beat women who didn't; Muhammad Reza Shah beat neither.

After 1979, Iran was subjected to militant and breakneck re-Islamisation. The Zoroastrian era was declared to be jahiliyyah, a benighted slum of ignorance and idolatry, and a dire embarrassment to all good Muslims. In the mid-1990s, for example, the historian Jahangir Tafazoli was put to death simply because he was the best-known specialist on ancient Iran. We would call this "killing the messenger", and we would call the entire tendency "delusional denial". The 30-year suppression of the mixed Iranian soul – which says yes to freedom and tolerance, yes to love and life and art, yes to Islam, and yes to modernity – provided the energy and courage of the June Events, and entrained the hideous murder of Neda Soltan.

* * *

So now we have another four years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who will be more purple-gummed with insecurity than ever, and another four years of troubled dreams about the Iranian bomb. I find that the one thing Ahmadinejad mandates, with full legitimacy, is a tone of ridicule – because it is impossible to write solemnly about the man who, among other absurdities, clinched the 2005 election by the simple feat of not having a Jacuzzi. And you needn't reread that sentence: the "Jacuzzi moment", or the no-Jacuzzi moment, when the candidate revealed that yes, he had no Jacuzzi, was widely credited with securing his majority. This was enough, apparently, to make him shine out in the smog of pelf and hypocrisy that passes for the Islamic Republic.

The American politician whom Ahmadinejad most closely resembles – in one vital respect – is Ronald Reagan. General similarities, I agree, are hard to spot. Ahmadinejad doesn't live on a ranch with a former starlet. Reagan didn't have a degree in traffic control. Ahmadinejad doesn't use Grecian 2000 (as his rapidly greying hair triumphantly attests). Reagan, as a young man, wasn't involved in the murder of political adversaries. And so on. But what they have in common is this: both figures are denizens of that stormlit plain where end-time theology meets nuclear weapons.

Now we can return, for a while, to dissimilarities. Ahmadinejad is not checked and balanced by democratic institutions. Reagan did not actually spend public money on civic preparations for the Second Coming, and was not the product of a culture saturated in ecstatic fantasies of morbid torment. Ahmadinejad does not have a temperament in which "simple-minded idealism" (in Eric Hobsbawm's formulation) might lead him to recognise "the sinister absurdity" of the arms race. And Reagan was not answerable to some millenarian vicar in the holy city of, say, Baltimore. Finally, whereas Reagan wielded enough firepower to kill everyone on earth several times over, Ahmadinejad does not yet have his Button.

Jesus Christ, according to both presidents, is due very shortly, but in Ahmadinejad's vision the Nazarene will merely form a part of the entourage of a much grander personage – the Hidden Imam. Who is the Hidden Imam? In the year 873, the bloodline of the Prophet came to an end when Hasan al-Askari (in Shiism, the 11th legitimate imam) died without an heir. At this point, among the believers, a classic circularity took hold. It was assumed that there must be an heir; there was no record of his existence, they reasoned, because extraordinary efforts had been made to conceal it; and extraordinary efforts had been made because this little boy was an extraordinary imam – the Mahdi, in fact, or the Lord of Time.

In Shia eschatology the Mahdi will return during a period of great tribulation (during, say, a nuclear war), will deliver the faithful from injustice and oppression, and will then supervise the Day of Judgment. Not only Ahmadinejad but members of his cabinet have been giving the Hidden Imam "about four years" – well within the president's second term. And where has the Hidden Imam dwelt since the ninth century? In "occultation", wherever that may be. The Hidden Imam is at least intelligibly called the Lord of Time: he is 1,100 years old.

Rule number one: no theocracy can ever deploy nuclear arms. And Iran, we respectfully suggest, is not yet ready for the force that drives the sun. We all know what Ahmadinejad thinks of Israel (and we remember his Islamists' conference, or his goons' rodeo, in Tehran, on the historicity of the Holocaust). Yet this is what Ali Rafsanjani thinks of Israel – Rafsanjani, the old, much-jailed revolutionary chancer, a pragmatist and reformer, hugely worldly, hugely venal: "The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything", whereas a counterstrike on Iran will merely "harm" the Islamic world; "it is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality". Indeed, given the Shia commitment to martyrdom, mutual assured destruction, as one Israeli official put it, "is not a deterrent. It's an incentive."

Nuclear weapons, it seems, were sent down here to furnish mankind with a succession of excruciating dilemmas. Until recently the mullahs' quest for the H-bomb seemed partly containable: the nuclear powers could give face to Tehran, and begin to scale back their arsenals towards the zero option. But now those powers include North Korea (already the land of the living dead); and the Islamic Republic, in any case, no longer seems appeasable. Equipped with weapons of fission or fusion, the supreme leader may delegate first use to Hezbollah, or to the Call of Islam, or to the Legion of the Pure. Or he may himself become the first suicide bomber to be gauged in megatons.

* * *

Meanwhile, the memory of the June Events, and of Neda Soltan, will do its work, and add weight to the mass of unendurable humiliations meted out to the Iranian people. Meanwhile, too, the senescent regime (I again warily predict) will reach beyond crackdownism for the supposedly unifying effects of war. Not a war against someone its own size, or someone bigger. Tiny Bahrain, which is 60% Shia, looks about right.

As for apocalyptic Islamism, in all its forms, I cannot improve on the great Norman Cohn. This is from the 1995 foreword to Warrant for Genocide (1967), where the subject is the Tsarist fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and what Jewry calls the Shoa, or the Wind of Death:

"There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics [notably the lower clergy] for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history."

• Martin Amis's novel The Pregnant Widow will be published by Cape next February

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/17/martin-amis-iran

The End of the Beginning

The End of the Beginning

By ROGER COHEN

TEHRAN - Iran's 1979 revolution took a full year to gestate. The uprising of 2009 has now ended its first phase. But the volatility ushered in by the June 12 ballot-box putsch of Iran's New Right is certain to endure over the coming year. The Islamic Republic has been weakened.

During one of the violent clashes here in recent days, I saw a member of the riot police confront a protester holding a cell phone. "Don't take a photograph of me!" he yelled at the young man.

"Why?" the man shouted back. "You're not naked."

But the Islamic Republic is. Everyone knows where everyone stands; it isn't pretty. All the fudge that allowed a modern society to coexist with a theocracy inspired by an imam occulted in the 9th century has been swept away, leaving two Irans at war.

One of those Irans, embodied in the 12-member Guardian Council, the highest legal body, ruled in a preliminary statement on Tuesday that "no major fraud" had occurred in the vote and that its annulment was therefore impossible. Not much surprise there, in that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, made clear last week that the recount was a waste of time.

Of course, the definition of "major" is up for debate. Khamenei himself said rigging one million votes might be feasible, and the council found irregularities with three million votes.

But numbers have ceased to mean anything here. All the evidence is that percentages were simply allotted to each candidate and the votes cast backward-engineered from there. The Interior Ministry took 10 days to divulge results for all provinces. Such engineering takes time.

Iran has squandered a huge opportunity to bridge the gulf between the regime and an increasingly sophisticated population thirsting for greater freedom. A vibrant election campaign opened a door. It has been slammed shut.

"The Islamic Republic is the flag-bearer of human rights," Khamenei declared in his Friday sermon. Over the past week, it has looked more like a flag-bearing police state.

True, the regime has not opened fire Tiananmen Square-style on the millions who have taken to the streets. I don't believe it has the unity to do that. Significant cracks have emerged within the establishment, certainly the largest since the bloody first couple of years after the revolution. Relentless official attacks on foreign agents as the instigators of unrest have not papered over these divisions.

As the Group of Combatant Clergy, which represents more liberal mullahs in Qom, said in a statement: "What sane mind believes that a peaceful movement of millions of informed people - including workers, shopkeepers, farmers, students, clergy and others - could be agents of a so-called enemy?"

I said the Islamic Republic has been weakened. Why? I see five principal factors. The first is that the supreme leader's post - the apex of the structure conceived by the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - has been undermined. The keystone of the arch is now loose.

Khamenei, far from an arbiter with a Prophet-like authority, has looked more like a ruthless infighter. His word has been defied. At night, from rooftops, I've even heard people call for his death. The unthinkable has occurred.

The second is that the hypocritical but effective contract that bound society has been broken. The regime never had active support from more than 20 percent of the population. But acquiescence was secured by using only highly targeted repression (leaving the majority free to go about its business), and by giving people a vote for the president every four years.

That's over. Repression will be broad and ferocious in the coming months. The acquiescent have already become the angry. You can't turn Iran into Burma: The resistance of a society this varied and savvy will be fierce.

The third is that a faction loyal to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, fiercely nationalistic and mystically religious, has made a power grab so bold that fissures in the establishment have become canyons.

Members of this faction include Hassan Taeb, the leader of the Basiji militia; Saeed Jalili, the head of the National Security Council and chief nuclear negotiator; and Mojtaba Khamenei, the reclusive but influential son of the supreme leader.

They have their way for now, but the cost to Iran has been immense, and the rearguard action led by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a father of the revolution, and Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, will be intense.

The fourth is that Iran's international rhetoric, effective in Ahmadinejad's first term, will be far less so now. Every time he talks of justice and ethics, his two favorite words, video will roll of Neda Agha Soltan's murder and the regime's truncheon-wielding goons at work. The president may prove too much of a liability to preserve.

The fifth is that, at the very peak of its post-revolution population boom, the regime has lost a whole new generation - and particularly the women of that generation - by failing to adapt.

Thirty years from the revolution, the core question of this election was: Must Iran stand apart from the forces of economic and political globalization in order to preserve its Islamic theocracy?

Or is it confident enough of its Islamic identity, and its now firmly established independence from America, to trash the nest-of-spies vitriol and an ultimately self-defeating isolation?

The answer has been devastating.

http://www.nytimes.com

Poll: Few Iranians see US favorably, despite Obama

Poll: Few Iranians see US favorably, despite Obama

By ALAN FRAM
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Few Iranians have favorable opinions of the United States, a view that has changed little since the election of an American president who has expressed a willingness to talk to Tehran, a rare poll of Iranian citizens showed Monday.

Even so, the survey shows Iranians continue to strongly want their country to adopt democratic institutions like free elections and a free press, the poll showed. There also remains a widespread willingness to stage unconditional negotiations with the U.S. following nearly three decades of diplomatic estrangement between the two countries.

Just 29 percent of Iranians said they have favorable views of the United States in the latest poll, which was conducted last month. In a similar survey in February 2008 - nearly a year before Barack Obama became president - 34 percent had positive opinions about the U.S.

In a further sign of wariness toward the United States, 38 percent in last month's poll said the U.S. is the greatest threat to Iran. Only Israel was ranked higher - 44 percent of Iranians said the Jewish state posed the greatest threat to their country.

Accurate public opinion polls are a rarity in Iran, whose Islamic rulers enforce strict rules of behavior and where dissidents are often imprisoned. The survey was conducted by telephone from a nearby country that the sponsors declined to identify for security reasons.

The poll was conducted for Terror Free Tomorrow, a bipartisan group that tries to undermine support for terrorism, and for the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute. Both are based in Washington.

The latest survey was released days before Friday's national elections in Iran, in which hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is being pressed by his main challenger, reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Iran's media is largely controlled by the government, though the Iranian people increasingly have access to the Internet. That makes it hard to gauge how much information Iranians have received about Obama and his repeated statements that he is open to talks in hopes of improving relations.

"How much of Obama's message has been broadcast to them, I have no idea," said Ken Ballen, president of Terror Free Tomorrow.

The new poll shows 87 percent of Iranians favor making free elections a long-term goal for Iran, up a slight 5 percentage points from a year ago. Another 84 percent want a free press to be a long-term goal, up 6 percentage points.

Those figures were not much lower than the 90 percent who said improving the economy should be a long-term goal for Iran, where economic conditions have been poor in recent years.

Sixty percent said they favor unconditional talks with the U.S., virtually unchanged from last year.

Washington and Tehran have not had diplomatic relations since 1979, when radicals seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held American hostages for 444 days. They are currently at odds over Iran's nuclear program, which the U.S. says is aimed at developing nuclear weapons, a charge Iran has contested.

The survey was conducted by KA Europe SPRL, a privately owned research company.

Telephone interviews, conducted in Farsi, involved a random sample of 1,001 adult Iranians from May 11-20. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. The company says more than 90 percent of Iranians have landline telephones.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_IRAN_POLL?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2009-06-08-12-42-25

India halts Gasoline Exports to Iran

India's Reliance halts petrol sales to Iran

India's Reliance Industries has stopped gasoline exports to Iran, to help avoid possible restrictions on sales of its fuel to the US market, the Economic Times reported on Thursday.

The newspaper cited an identified company official as saying the sales were halted last month.

"As a corporate policy and to maintain business confidentiality, we do not comment on specific transactions," a Reliance spokesman said.

Twenty-five US senators from both parties in April proposed giving President Barack Obama new leverage in the dispute over Tehran's nuclear ambitions: the authority to sanction companies supplying gasoline to Iran.

Iran is the world's fourth-largest oil exporter, but lacks the refining capacity to meet domestic demand and relies heavily on imports to guarantee fuel at the pumps.

Reliance operates a 660,000 barrels per day (bpd) refinery at Jamnagar in western India and its subsidiary Reliance Petroleum commissioned a new export-focused 580,000 bpd plant adjacent to the existing refinery.

After reaching full capacity, the new refinery and the existing plant will make the Jamnagar complex the world's single-biggest supplier of fuels to the global market, pumping out 1.24 million bpd. – Reuters

http://www.tradearabia.com/news/newsdetails.asp?Sn=INTBIZ&artid=162473

What Would Happen if Israel Attacked Iran?

What Would Happen if Israel Attacked Iran?

29/05/2009
By Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed

The answer that summarizes everything is that no one can do much more than sit in front of the television screens, and watch the red skies. Naturally, this applies to the Tunisian or Mauritanian citizen, for instance, who is far away from the battle field; however, there are large engagement areas that will be threatened with involvement unwillingly by either of the two warring sides, such as the Gulf, Iraq, Palestine, and perhaps beyond these countries.

However, the first question is: Does Israel actually intend to attack Iran, or is it merely political saber rattling? I think that this time the threats are more serious than at any previous time. I do not exclude that the war might erupt after the end of the time limit given by the United States to the Iranians to reach a political solution for the nuclear problem, a time limit that is said to end by the end of the year.

The Israelis consider that Iran's possession of a nuclear bomb is an issue of life-and-death, and will fight with everything they have got regardless of the consequences for them or the others. The Israelis believe that Iran might use its nuclear weapons against them; this is contrary to the case with Pakistan, which today possesses a nuclear arsenal of more than 60 nuclear weapons, but Israel has not protested against it.

It is not sufficient merely to know the intentions of Israel, but it is also important to understand the US stance, which increasingly accepts at least a military attack, but not a major war, against Iran after Tehran has got very close - as it is circulating -to having enough fuel to build its own nuclear weapon.

Now, let us go back to the title of the article; what can we do?

If Israel attacks Iran this will mean that Iran will strike right and left: the US ships in the Gulf, the Gulf oil installations, and the US military bases. Naturally Iran will launch a tirade of its missiles against Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, as Saddam Hussein did in the war to liberate Kuwait.

The reason, in my opinion, is that Iran knows that it will not achieve a military victory, because it has neither the offensive nor the defensive capabilities that can protect it from the harm of the US-supported Israeli aggression. However, Iran will resort to inflicting damage in every direction so that it would be able to declare a propaganda victory, the same as Hezbollah did in the summer war against Israel, and Hamas did in the winter war against Israel.

Here, there will be nothing that can be done unless Iran goes further by targeting the Gulf countries in an intensive way through its sleeper terrorist cells, and by targeting the vital centers through missile strikes. A deliberate and continuous action by Iran most probably will compel these countries to join the war.

Some people might think that the Gulf countries are a foregone conclusion as an Iranian target because of the US military bases on their territories, such as Qatar; the US fleets in their harbors, such as in Bahrain; the explicit protection treaties, such as with Kuwait; and over and above all the GCC joint defense agreement among the GCC countries, which means that an attack against any member country will lead to collective war.

The only possibility for the war to remain limited is if Iran restricts itself to replying to Israel, but I rule out this possibility to a great extent.

As for why do we talk today about war, and not peace? This is because we cannot see anything other than the end of the aspired for peaceful solution that preserves for Iran its right to obtain nuclear energy, and protects the region, and not only Israel, from the evil of Iran's possession of nuclear weapons.

Iran: the next Japan?

Iran: the next Japan?

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Clinton Bastin argues that Iran is a nation with sophisticated nuclear fuel cycle programme and should be treated as such.

Israel has 50 to 200 nuclear weapons, “implosion” type, tested and reliable, courtesy of France. They contain plutonium, produced in the heavy water reactor and recovered in the reprocessing plant, both at Dimona, supplied by France. Israel has not signed the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Iran has signed the NPT, has a nuclear power programme that is fully safeguarded by the International Atomic Energy Agency and is most important to Iran’s interests because of diminishing supplies of oil. Iran produces low enriched uranium needed for nuclear power because of its past experience with denial by the United States of important fuel cycle technology that had been promised.

Iran’s low-enriched uranium as uranium (2 to 5%U-235) hexaflouride (UF6) will be converted to uranium oxide for use as fuel for nuclear power. Uranium of this enrichment can be fairly easily handled without great danger of a criticality accident.

Low-enriched uranium cannot be used to make a nuclear weapon. The UF6 would have to be withdrawn from fully safeguarded inventories and returned to gas centrifuges for further enrichment, to about 90% U-235. This material would then need to be processed into metal, for use in a”gun” type weapon. Facilities for processing uranium into metal probably do not exist in Iran, and there is much more danger from criticality during such processing.

The uranium metal would then need to be cast, fabricated, machined into precise parts for a gun-type weapon (like cylinder and piston rings) and then assembled, with high explosive, into a weapon. All processing would be very dangerous, and the assembled weapon would likely not be “One-point” safe. First such US weapons were not; a torpedo bomber with such a weapon crashing and catching fire on a carrier deck would have about 5 minutes to put fire out prior to full nuclear detonation.

A gun-type weapon requires about 100 pounds of U-235, which would require about 2-1/2 tons of uranium enriched to 2% U235 to produce. Losses during processing and fabrication would at least double the amount needed.

The diversion of this much uranium from safeguarded inventories would be easily detected; time needed to make a weapon by Iran would be two to four years. Israel does not have experience with uranium-based nuclear weapons, and quality of its technical assessment of intelligence of Iran’s nuclear programme is probably limited.

I hope that you will support leaving Iran like Japan – a nation with an increasingly sophisticated nuclear fuel cycle programme that is carefully safeguarded to manage proliferation risks.

I was US coordinator with Japan for nuclear fuel cycle development during final few years of my career at DoE and visited Japan's fuel cycle centre at Rokkasho-mura with US Senate energy committee chairman Frank Murkowski in December 1996. Unfortunately, the reprocessing technology that I inherited for the collaboration was flawed and the reprocessing plant there is much too expensive and will have problems.

The reprocessing technology promised to Iran by us in 1970 was also flawed (similar to that provided to India, used for US nuclear power fuel, etc). I can provide full details.

We also need to accept that Iran's relationship with Hamas and Hezbollah will continue, and be willing to work with Tehran to integrate these groups into lasting settlement of the Middle East's core political conflicts.

​
Author Info:

Clinton Bastin is a retired US Department of Energy Chemical Engineer/Nuclear Scientist  

A Persian puzzle

BARACK OBAMA has spoken of reaching out to difficult regimes, if only such opponents would unclench their fists. In turn Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has given some indication that his country would be willing to engage with America, if it could be done on the basis of “mutual respect”. The latest step in the delicate diplomatic dance between Iran and America was taken on Monday February 23rd, as Mr Obama named his new point-man for Iran.

It has been a long time coming. For over a month rumours abounded that the job would go to Dennis Ross, a former negotiator for America in Arab-Israeli peace talks. But while other envoys to the Middle East were announced—one each for Palestine-Israel and Afghanistan-Pakistan—Mr Ross’s appointment was delayed. Some think him too close to Israel; a critical former State Department official has suggested that he was Israel’s lawyer in negotiations with the Palestinians, and he has lately hung his hat at a pro-Israel think-tank. Part of the delay may have revolved around his exact responsibilities and title. Rumour had it that he would be a “super-envoy” above all others in Middle East policy. That seems to have been overdone; he will instead be a “special adviser” for the Gulf and south-west Asia. America has no direct relations with Iran, yet: deciding whether and how to open up to the country will be a delicate process. It remains unclear whether the Iranians will want to talk to Mr Ross at all: some Iran-policy experts suggest that his background will put the Iranians off. Nor is it clear what the scope of any talks might be.

One view is that America and Iran should start small. They could, for example, limit first contacts to how America and Iran might work together in two countries of common (if not exactly mutual) interest, Iraq and Afghanistan. America has talked to Iran over Iraq, and America’s incoming ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, is experienced at dealing with difficult regimes, having been a negotiator with North Korea. Afghanistan is another area of common concern; Iran will not want it to be dominated again by fanatical Sunnis, having nearly gone to war with the Taliban regime in 1998 over a massacre of Iranian diplomats. America, for its part, is worried about its supply lines to Afghanistan, as routes to the landlocked war zone currently go through Pakistan. However critics of the “start small” approach fear that without a strategic goal clearly communicated—say an American renunciation of “regime change” and a complete Iranian renunciation of nuclear weapons—Iran would merely stall during any talks.

Timing is another ticklish issue for Mr Obama. Some urge him to begin engaging with Iran as soon as possible, to capitalise on the good will (at home and beyond) that has accompanied his election. But Iran holds its own presidential election in June and there is some uncertainty about the likely winner. Mr Ahmadinejad may be the favourite but his re-election is not guaranteed, given a shaky economy and frustration among urban Iranians who think he has needlessly isolated their country.

Complicating the picture is the announcement that Muhammad Khatami, a reformist, will enter the race. When Mr Khatami was president, from 1997 to 2005, he loosened social strictures in Iran and was popular among students and the young, even if he failed to open the political system. Although many reformists consider him to be a disappointment, it would be easier for America and other outsiders to engage with him than with Mr Ahmadinejad. Nonetheless, the election would not change everything. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would continue to be influential, whoever wins.

Last there is the ticking of the nuclear clock. A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency recently suggested that Iran has more low-enriched nuclear material than previously thought. It has enough for a nuclear bomb, though that material would yet require much more enrichment, which is no mean feat. American hawks note that Mr Khatami is no dove; the nuclear-weapons programme that America’s spies think Iran suspended in 2003 was ongoing under Mr Khatami’s watch. And average Iranians support Iran’s unhampered right to nuclear technology, even if they do not want a bomb.

With all these considerations in the balance, it is no wonder that Mr Obama has moved cautiously on Iran. He has pressing domestic and economic concerns, too, so may feel it is wise to proceed slowly with any foreign-policy changes. But even if Mr Obama is wise to take careful steps he—and Mr Ross—will come under greater pressure to spell out soon what path he hopes to follow.

They think they have right on their side - Why the Iranians see themselves in a very different light

They think they have right on their side

Nov 22nd 2007 | TEHRAN
From The Economist print edition

Why the Iranians see themselves in a very different light


IT IS not hard to find examples of the peculiar divergence between how the world looks from Tehran, Iran's capital, and how it looks in the West. Take the recent release of a long-awaited report on Iran's nuclear programme by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog. To Iran's state-controlled television, the report showed Iran's innocence and slapped its detractors in the face. In Washington, DC, the focus was on the report's doubts, which appeared to justify a push for further punitive sanctions.

But in many ways, the sparring capitals look more like mirror images than polar opposites. On different scales, both Iranians and Americans tend to take an imperial view. Both governments demonise the other. They use past resentments to reap political rewards by looking tough.

Yet in both America and Iran, currents of dissent are growing, even inside their administrations. In neither case do the dissenters differ much from their leader's stated objective: for Iran it is to claim a perceived right to nuclear technology; for America it is to perform an assumed duty to stop Iran making atomic bombs. In both cases, critics lambast their leaders for tactics that may take their countries to war.

In some respects, those leaders are oddly similar. George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are both deeply religious, referring frequently to God's guiding hand. Both are idealists rather than pragmatists, and skilled at folksy populism. Both have replaced dozens of competent officials with like-minded conservatives. And both are now considered, by a large slice of their countrymen, to be bungling and dangerous. The difference is that it has taken Mr Ahmadinejad just two years in power to achieve the unpopularity Mr Bush has gained after six.

There are differences, of course. Mr Bush may be accused of curtailing civil liberties in pursuit of his war on terror. But his government does not drag women off the streets for maladjusting hijabs, the obligatory covering of head and shoulders, or jail student activists as dangers to national security or smear political opponents as traitors or muzzle their speech.

On the other hand, Mr Ahmadinejad may be bombastic but he has not implied he may bomb America—and could not, even if he wanted to. Oceans and an unparalleled armoury separate America from any conceivable enemy, except small bands of terrorists. The strategic view from Tehran, by contrast, is of guns pointing from every direction, at close range, and of potential treachery from within. Only a paranoid fringe in America thinks the country's constitution or the values underpinning it face an imminent threat of being overturned. That fringe is in charge in Iran.

Mr Ahmadinejad's inner circle consists of zealots determined to keep the flame of the 1979 Islamic revolution burning, no matter how much fuel it takes; in fact, it takes a great deal. Of the literal kind, hydrocarbons, Mr Ahmadinejad is lucky to have plenty to burn. For Iran has the world's second-largest reserves of natural gas and third largest of oil. This president's tenure has coincided with surging prices that have pushed Iran's oil income above $50 billion a year. By some counts, it has earned nearly as much under Mr Ahmadinejad as it did in the two four-year terms of his predecessor, Muhammad Khatami.

But to the dismay of Iranian economists, Mr Ahmadinejad has used this windfall to build immediate political capital rather than invest in the future. He has tirelessly toured the provinces, promising massive spending on local projects while maintaining subsidies that, by some estimates, devour a third of the government's budget and account for some 15% of GNP.

Not only has this postponed what many see as vital reforms. The flood of government cash has helped push annual inflation towards 20%. Property prices have risen even faster, sending rents in Tehran beyond the means of new households when the population pyramid's widest tier bulges in the 20-30 age bracket. Property owners have benefited, but sociologists note that the gap between rich and poor yawns as widely as under the hated shah whom the ayatollahs ousted.

Not that wealthy Iranians are very happy either. Businessmen, unlike ordinary citizens, are painfully aware of how international sanctions squeeze the economy and how tougher sanctions could hurt it far more. Until now, traders have generally found ways to keep going. They have switched en masse from Western to East Asian suppliers, such that in a few short years China has replaced Europe as Iran's main trading partner. They have also found ways to skirt the rather effective American pressure on international banks to avoid dealing with Iran, mostly by working through foreign intermediaries, and in non-dollar currencies.

But such means come at increasing expense. One economist reckons that extra charges to open letters of credit via Dubai add 10-20% to the cost of every transaction. Small businesses courier cash back and forth to the Gulf emirate, but should banking strictures tighten, bigger firms would face serious trouble. The local assembler of Peugeot cars, says a consultant, is not going to be able to pay for 100,000 French-made gearboxes in cash.

Government officials try hard to project confidence. They point, for instance, to a boom in house construction and to Iran's success at gaining self-sufficiency in such things as wheat, steel and cement. Petrol rationing, which sparked widespread protest when introduced in June, has, in fact, sharply cut imports. It is true, too, that despite the sanctions imposed by America since the revolution, Iran has enjoyed two decades of steady if unspectacular economic growth. The country seems mildly prosperous compared with its neighbours, with tidy parks, clean streets and impressive figures for schooling and health care.
We don't really need you anyway

Another common official refrain is that the world needs Iran more than Iran needs the world. There is some truth to this. With its 70m consumers, many of them young, Iran is a hugely tempting market. China and India thirst for Iranian energy, while Europe dreams of finding an alternative to dependence on Russia for its gas.

Yet it is hard, hearing tales of bureaucratic hurdles, corruption and Mafia-like interference by such privileged groups as the Revolutionary Guards, and seeing the level of talent displayed by many Iranian entrepreneurs, not to conclude that a country with such rich natural endowments is performing far below its potential.

Iranian analysts debate whether Mr Ahmadinejad's free-spending ways have bolstered or diminished his base of support. Some argue that the rural poor, long disregarded by the urban elite, have directly benefited from state handouts and still warm to his rhetoric of class retribution. Even the middle class, they say, can see for itself the improvements in infrastructure, such as the underground train systems being built in four provincial cities, as well as for the capital. Others note that in local elections last December, the president's men, who generally fared badly, fared worst in districts where Mr Ahmadinejad previously served in local government. The implication is that those who know him best believe him least.

Iranians grumble openly about the economy. They tend to be less vocal but more worried about Mr Ahmadinejad's other policies. Unbidden, many express dismay at his inflammatory questioning of the Nazi Holocaust, citing this as an example of antics that achieve nothing for Iran. When the mayor of Tehran, Muhammad Qalibaf, a pragmatic conservative, recently called for more “maturity and intelligence” in the handling of foreign affairs, the rumble of approval was almost audible over Tehran's traffic din. His voice joined a chorus that has spread across Iran's complex political spectrum, from the left wing of idealist reformers through the varied hues of conservatism in the centre and up to the margins of the usulgaran (fundamentalist) faction, whose radical right wing Mr Ahmadinejad represents.


Yet such criticism has tended to be muted. Iran is no longer as brutal a police state as in the revolution's early years nor even as oppressive as many of its neighbours. Though Iranians bemoan the ineffectiveness of the reformists who dominated the country under his predecessor, Mr Khatami, many do credit them with dispelling the mood of fear that permeated the 1980s and much of the 1990s.

But under Mr Ahmadinejad, selective repression has intensified just enough to signal that open dissent has again grown dangerous. His fellow fundamentalists who dominate such institutions as the judiciary, the state prosecution service and the police have gleefully carried out orders to harass reformist newspapers, stifle student and labour protests, and crack down on “bad hijab”, supposedly improper adherence to strict Islamic dress codes.

Their efforts have proved quite effective. Most Iranians probably resist the idea of returning to the supposed Islamic purity of the early revolution, yet most are far too preoccupied with getting by to protest. The hijab, even reformists admit, is not much of an issue to the broader public, even though many hate the bullying, hectoring ways by which it is imposed.

Indeed, most Iranians are probably quite proud of their experiment with Islamic-flavoured semi-democracy. Despite the flaws in the system, they tend to respect their institutions. As several young Iranians volunteered to this correspondent, having lived through one revolution, the last thing they want is another.
Knowing the right beards

Besides, Mr Ahmadinejad has had powerful allies. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has directly blessed the fierce morality campaign, and said he considers this the best administration the Islamic Republic has yet seen, though a newspaper close to Mr Khamenei this week accused the president of treating his opponents “immorally”.

Surprisingly to outsiders, who tend to view Iran through the lens of its articulate dissidents, Mr Khamenei remains a revered figure; his office still basks in the shadow of the republic's founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Indeed, official portraits of the bearded head of state show a smaller inset of his famously glowering, even more lushly bearded predecessor peering over Mr Khamenei's shoulder.

The supreme leader cultivates an aura of aloofness from mundane affairs, but his backing carries more than moral weight. He directly controls the state broadcasting system and the 125,000-man Revolutionary Guards corps, which mans Iran's borders (so profiting, it is said, from smuggling rackets), liaises with overseas Islamist groups such as Lebanon's Hizbullah and the Palestinians' Hamas, and also runs hundreds of commercial enterprises.
AFP

Revering the president's favourite mosque

Mr Khamenei is also constitutionally charged with setting the broad foreign-policy agenda. He appoints top judges and half the members of the Guardian's Council, a body of clerics that, among other things, vets candidates for political office. The leader has access to a pool of funds that includes pious donations as well as income from several bonyads, holding companies tied to religious foundations.

Still, Mr Khamenei, a shrewd arbiter of Iran's bruising politics, has been careful not to allow the president full rein. Crucially, he has refrained from blocking the rise of conservative rivals of Mr Ahmadinejad, such as Hashemi Rafsanjani, a pragmatic former president, in key institutions.

Yet the supreme leader has so far concurred with Mr Ahmadinejad's hard line on one crucial issue, the nuclear file. This may reflect a similar world view: both deeply distrust Western intentions, sense that offence may be Iran's best defence, and feel that Iran is poised to regain its natural place as the region's strongman.

Iran has, after all, so far got away with defying the UN Security Council's order to stop enriching nuclear fuel. But his support on this score for the president also reflects Mr Khamenei's respect for the skill of a populist who has, far better than his rivals, conveyed to the public a link between possession of nuclear technology and a semi-sacred sense of national destiny.
Clever advertising jingles

This is important, because the nuclear programme is not easy to promote. Practically speaking, it makes little sense. Iran has poured an estimated $10 billion into building a complete, home-grown nuclear industry, yet it has just one nuclear power plant, the Russian-built Bushehr reactor, due to come on stream next year. The same money could have built ten conventional plants of the same capacity, fired solely by the natural gas that Iran currently flares off into the sky, because it has not invested in the technology to recover it. Russia has pledged a ten-year supply of fuel for the Bushehr reactor, meaning that there should be no use, any time soon, for the output of Iran's costly nuclear-enrichment plant at Natanz. The purpose of its heavy-water facility at Arak is even more obscure.

Yet the nuclear issue has been successfully portrayed to the Iranian public as a question not of economics but of national pride. Iranians bristle at the suggestion that they may not need nuclear energy. Why, they retort, should they not have it? The sole reason, as Mr Ahmadinejad insists, is that the West wants to keep Iran backward. Most Iranians appear convinced by their government's repeated assertions that the programme is entirely peaceful. Even if Iran produces a nuclear weapon, comes the common retort, so what? Neighbouring Pakistan, far less stable, has them. So does Israel. Those countries have only existed since the 1940s, whereas Iran has been home to a brilliant civilisation since history's beginning. So the rhetoric goes. Given Iran's sense of itself as a thwarted great power, it is easy to see how the issue has grown so touchy.

Yet unease persists among sophisticated Iranians. Even some religious conservatives understand that the nuclear question is not a Manichean one, pitting the good of Iranian progress against the bad of its enemies' ill will. Western countries, led by America, have been inept at explaining that they do not wish to deny nuclear know-how to Iran but simply do not trust its leaders. But the less outspoken opposition of nearly all Iran's neighbours, as well as of Russia and China (see article), is starting to focus Iranian minds.

The barrage of official praise for the latest report of the UN's nukes-watching agency cannot disguise the fact that it includes some pointed criticisms. True enough, Iran has co-operated pretty much to the letter with the agency. What is missing, the report strongly implies, aside from the required obedience to the Security Council's diktat over nuclear enrichment, is Iran's recognition that it could easily do more to dispel doubts as to its intentions.

It is this point that is starting to cause schisms in Tehran. In a brave move, Shireen Ebadi, a Nobel prize-winning human-rights lawyer, recently called in public for an immediate stop to the enrichment programme. Needless to say, Ms Ebadi is seen as anathema in Iran's ruling circles. Yet her point that Iran would lose little by such a step merely aired in public what more establishment figures say in private. It also served to underline the anxiety generated by another of Mr Ahmadinejad's brash gestures. Following a speech in which he blasted critics of his nuclear policy as traitors, his government announced it would press espionage charges against Hossein Mousavian, who served as Iran's chief nuclear negotiator under Mr Khatami. This, it seems, is what drew this week's sharp rebuke of the president from the supreme leader's camp.

The common explanation in Tehran is that the espionage charge was aimed at tarring the previous administration and reformists in general as dangers to the revolution. Mr Mousavian is known to be close to Mr Rafsanjani—some would say under his protection. Yet this kind of tough domestic politicking also showed up Mr Ahmadinejad's government as dangerously isolated in the world. If there is really nothing to hide about the Iranian nuclear programme, what could there be to spy on?

Mr Ahmadinejad may be correct in judging that, for the time being, he can brazen out his nuclear programme. Most Western countries plainly judge the risks of a military attack on Iran to be greater than its rewards. America is probably beginning to see the advantages of co-operation with Iran in resolving Iraq's woes. But Mr Ahmadinejad is wrong to think that he is home free. The danger of an unwanted outbreak of hostilities, provoked by some chance incident, remains great. Iran will continue to pay a high price, even without toughened sanctions, for its lack of openness on the nuclear issue.

Perhaps most distressing for Mr Ahmadinejad, he is likely to pay a high price in domestic politics for his lack of tact. Assuming there is no American attack on Iran to provoke a nationalist backlash, his radical fundamentalists may well get drubbed in the parliamentary elections in March. In the poll that brought him to power in 2005, some 20m Iranians refrained from voting. Many are itching to get in a word this time. Rather like his nemesis, Mr Bush, Mr Ahmadinejad may find himself facing a punchy parliament packed with people who want to get rid of him.

A predator becomes more dangerous when wounded

Washington's escalation of threats against Iran is driven by a determination to secure control of the region's energy resources

In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington's basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important. As was the norm during the cold war, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush sends more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq - a country otherwise free from any foreign interference - on the tacit assumption that Washington rules the world.

In the cold war-like mentality in Washington, Tehran is portrayed as the pinnacle in the so-called Shia crescent that stretches from Iran to Hizbullah in Lebanon, through Shia southern Iraq and Syria. And again unsurprisingly, the "surge" in Iraq and escalation of threats and accusations against Iran is accompanied by grudging willingness to attend a conference of regional powers, with the agenda limited to Iraq.

Presumably this minimal gesture toward diplomacy is intended to allay the growing fears and anger elicited by Washington's heightened aggressiveness. These concerns are given new substance in a detailed study of "the Iraq effect" by terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, revealing that the Iraq war "has increased terrorism sevenfold worldwide". An "Iran effect" could be even more severe.

For the US, the primary issue in the Middle East has been, and remains, effective control of its unparalleled energy resources. Access is a secondary matter. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. Control is understood to be an instrument of global dominance. Iranian influence in the "crescent" challenges US control. By an accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in largely Shia areas of the Middle East: southern Iraq, adjacent regions of Saudi Arabia and Iran, with some of the major reserves of natural gas as well. Washington's worst nightmare would be a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the US.

Such a bloc, if it emerges, might even join the Asian Energy Security Grid based in China. Iran could be a lynchpin. If the Bush planners bring that about, they will have seriously undermined the US position of power in the world.

To Washington, Tehran's principal offence has been its defiance, going back to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the hostage crisis at the US embassy. In retribution, Washington turned to support Saddam Hussein's aggression against Iran, which left hundreds of thousands dead. Then came murderous sanctions and, under Bush, rejection of Iranian diplomatic efforts.

Last July, Israel invaded Lebanon, the fifth invasion since 1978. As before, US support was a critical factor, the pretexts quickly collapse on inspection, and the consequences for the people of Lebanon are severe. Among the reasons for the US-Israel invasion is that Hizbullah's rockets could be a deterrent to a US-Israeli attack on Iran. Despite the sabre-rattling it is, I suspect, unlikely that the Bush administration will attack Iran. Public opinion in the US and around the world is overwhelmingly opposed. It appears that the US military and intelligence community is also opposed. Iran cannot defend itself against US attack, but it can respond in other ways, among them by inciting even more havoc in Iraq. Some issue warnings that are far more grave, among them the British military historian Corelli Barnett, who writes that "an attack on Iran would effectively launch world war three".

Then again, a predator becomes even more dangerous, and less predictable, when wounded. In desperation to salvage something, the administration might risk even greater disasters. The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. It has been unable to establish a reliable client state within, and cannot withdraw without facing the possible loss of control of the Middle East's energy resources.

Meanwhile Washington may be seeking to destabilise Iran from within. The ethnic mix in Iran is complex; much of the population isn't Persian. There are secessionist tendencies and it is likely that Washington is trying to stir them up - in Khuzestan on the Gulf, for example, where Iran's oil is concentrated, a region that is largely Arab, not Persian.

Threat escalation also serves to pressure others to join US efforts to strangle Iran economically, with predictable success in Europe. Another predictable consequence, presumably intended, is to induce the Iranian leadership to be as repressive as possible, fomenting disorder while undermining reformers.

It is also necessary to demonise the leadership. In the west, any wild statement by President Ahmadinejad is circulated in headlines, dubiously translated. But Ahmadinejad has no control over foreign policy, which is in the hands of his superior, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The US media tend to ignore Khamenei's statements, especially if they are conciliatory. It's widely reported when Ahmadinejad says Israel shouldn't exist - but there is silence when Khamenei says that Iran supports the Arab League position on Israel-Palestine, calling for normalisation of relations with Israel if it accepts the international consensus of a two-state settlement.

The US invasion of Iraq virtually instructed Iran to develop a nuclear deterrent. The message was that the US attacks at will, as long as the target is defenceless. Now Iran is ringed by US forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey and the Persian Gulf, and close by are nuclear-armed Pakistan and Israel, the regional superpower, thanks to US support.

In 2003, Iran offered negotiations on all outstanding issues, including nuclear policies and Israel-Palestine relations. Washington's response was to censure the Swiss diplomat who brought the offer. The following year, the EU and Iran reached an agreement that Iran would suspend enriching uranium; in return the EU would provide "firm guarantees on security issues" - code for US-Israeli threats to bomb Iran.

Apparently under US pressure, Europe did not live up to the bargain. Iran then resumed uranium enrichment. A genuine interest in preventing the development of nuclear weapons in Iran would lead Washington to implement the EU bargain, agree to meaningful negotiations and join with others to move toward integrating Iran into the international economic system.

© Noam Chomsky, New York Times Syndicate