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(December 2005) Ahmadinejad and how the Islamic world became what it is today. Iran's new president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not seem to miss an opportunity to provide Israel for an excuse to launch a preemptive strike (see What side is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on?). He has now started a campaign to expel the Jews from Israel. He claims that the Jews of Israel should be moved to Europe, because Israel was founded out of the Europeans' sense of guilt for the holocaust and Jewish persecutions in general. If it was a European mistake, why ask the Arabs to pay the price, he is asking. Needless to say, he does not mention that about half of Israel's population is made of Jews who were de facto expelled from Islamic countries (where should we send those Jews?), but that's a detail. The key point is the usual double standard of Islam: the Arabs occupy a large area that extends way beyond Arabia (from Morocco to Syria) and that was not the original land of their ancestors, but, according to Iran's president, Jews are not entitled to occupy a small area (that, by the way, was the original location of their ancestors). One may agree with Ahmadinejad that we should return the land to the descendants of the original owners to rectify the injustice of history,, but one then wonders why should the Arabs be entitled to keep Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq. If the Jews are to be sent back to Europe, shouldn't the Arabs be sent back to Arabia? And, first and foremost, shouldn't Iran, the land of Zoroaster, be liberated from Islam and returned to its original culture? (Needless to say, most people today have long forgotten what was taken and what was given by their ancestors. Italians do not blow up French because Corsica is part of France, and Mexicans do not blow up USA citizens because California used to be Mexican. But clearly some Islamic leaders are still living in an ancient stone-age world). Ahmadinejad's logic is pathetic, but what is more pathetic is that hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide find his double standard perfectly reasonable: let's move the non-Muslims out of the land conquered by the Muslims, and leave the Muslims in all the lands that they conquered from non-Muslims. Personally, I think that Ahmadinejad's plan is inevitable. Money talks, and, thanks to the oil economy, money favors the Islamic world. Therefore it is just a matter of time before Israel is reconquered by Islam, and the Jews are expelled once more. What Ahmadinejad and the Arabs fail to understand, though, is that this will be yet another missed opportunity by the Islamic world: there are far more scientists and engineers among Jews than among Muslims, and some Jews are responsible for some of the greatest discoveries of the last century (from Relativity to the nuclear bomb). The European countries that Ahmadinejad thinks will be punished by having to relocate the Jews are actually the countries that will benefit from an injection of Jewish science and technology. Ahmadinejad, like all dumb Islamic fanatics, thinks in terms of land and population. The rest of the world thinks in terms of competitive advantage. Ahmadinejad's idea is not only amoral: it is also a prescription for five more centuries of Islamic decadence. The European countries will benefit greatly from Ahmadinejad's plan, while the Arabs of Palestine will return to the stone age. Compare the attitude of the western countries with the attitude of the Islamic countries: western countries do everything they can to attract the best brains in the world, while Islamic countries do everything they can to send away the best brains in the world. (Then, of course, Islamic countries blame their backwardness on western countries). If you wonder how in heaven did the Islamic world fall behind so badly over the last four/five centuries, all you have to do is read Ahmadinejad's speeches. Back to the world news | Top of this page (November 2005) What side is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on? By calling for the destruction of Israel, the newly-elected president of Iran, Ahmadinejad, has just offered Israel an excuse for a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Now it is hard to see what will keep Israel for doing what it had long wanted to do but it had not done for fear of international repercussions. Now Israel's action would be totally justified: the president of Iran, by calling for the destruction of Israel, has de facto declared war on Israel. Thus Israel is entitled to strike. Back to the world news | Top of this page (June 2005) The birth of the China-Iran axis? Since no international independent organization was allowed to monitor the Iranian elections, we may never know for sure if the conservative, anti-USA, cleric Mahmoud Ahmadinejad truly won the majority of votes in Iran's presidential elections. But most likely he did. True: the candidates were carefully chosen by the ruling ayatollahs, so that no real alternative to the existing regime would be allowed. But it is likely that the Iranian voters (the few who cared to vote) truly chose this conservative cleric in the hope that he would at least deliver some economic (if not political) reforms. The fact that a conservative won is not any more undemocratic than the fact that a conservative, George W Bush, is president of the USA. What is alarming is the message that the Iranians are sending to the USA. They must have been aware that they were voting for someone who strongly opposes the USA. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was widely considered the favorite to win, promised to make peace with the USA: he lost. In that sense, this semi-democratic election may have been the biggest setback to the progress of democracy in the region, and all the more alarming since Iran borders on Iraq and can have an obvious influence on the future of the weak Iraqi democracy. Did the Iranian people truly vote against the USA-style democracy that they see growing across the border? If the people truly supported the hardline conservative, then western observers will need to completely rethink the political geography of that area. It was widely believed that Iranians were the most westernized of all people in the Middle East, the most eager to embrace the values of the West. One wonders how much the "nuclear" issue mattered to voters. Did they vote for a hardliner to teach the west a lesson about forbidding Iran to become a nuclear power? Perhaps Khameini's vision for Iran, a China-like state-controlled capitalist economy defended by a nuclear arsenal, is not to so hated by the Iranian voters. Iran's alliance with mainland China (its closest trading partner in strategic weapons and other key technologies) must now be taken seriously. Iran's leaders appear determined to confront the USA, not bend to their will, a tactic that will strengthen and will be strengthened by their alliance with mainland China. One can see a veritable China-Iran axis being formed in response to the USA's expansion in the Middle East. Iran looked surrounded by USA allies, but the alliance with mainland China makes Afghanistan (not Iran) the isolated country (neither Pakistan nor the former Soviet republics are really friends of Karzai). Beijing (mainland China) could now use Iran the same way that the USA uses Taiwan: as a natural air carrier in the middle of the enemy's sphere of influence. And the Iranian regime would receive from Beijing the same kind of protection that the Taiwanese democracy receives from the USA. It is not a coincidence that Iran decided to defy the West on the issue of nuclear energy: the only tool in the hands of the West is United Nations sanctions, but Beijing can veto any such initiative. Is it a coincidence that few countries (even in the Islamic world) warmly congratulated Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the way Beijing did? However, Ahmadinejad's victory could simply mean that the poor of Iran (the vast majority of the population) voted for "change" not in the ideological sense of the word but in the economic sense of the world. They may have viewed Rafsanjani as the defender of the rich, and Ahmadinejad as the defender of the poor. The masses (especially outside of Tehran) may have simply ignored the ideological factor. Poor people don't really care if you are a fascist or a communist, if you do business with the USA or Beijing: they want food and jobs. The reformists had mostly helped the rich get richer, and done little to alleviate the desperate conditions of the poor. Ahmadinejad was the only major candidate who ran on a populist platform of redistribution of the country's wealth. In a sense he is right-wing as far as religion goes, but left-wing as far as economics goes, an odd mixture of Franco (the old Spanish dictator) and Chavez (the populist president of Venezuela). Even so, the result has been to strengthen the hand of Khameini, and, indirectly, the influence of Beijing on the Middle East. Ahmadinejad's election is also the first piece of good news for the ever more isolated government of Syria. Iran is the only friend that Syria still has in the world. The more anti-USA the Iranian regime is, the bolder Syria might be in defying the USA. Economically, Europe stands to lose more than the USA. USA's sanctions against Iran mean that the USA economy depends very little on trade with Iran. But Europe has been a major trading partner, and now may suffer from the election of a president like Ahmadinejad who promised to favor Iranian companies over foreign companies. The Ahmadinejad government is certainly unlikely to help push the price of oil down (the price of oil being one of the causes for the European stagnation). For once, Iran's supreme leader, ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told the truth when he described Ahmadinejad's victory as a "profound humiliation" for the USA. Indeed it is, given the effort the USA has put into westernizing the region. (There is a third member to the axis: Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter. Iran and Venezuela have very similar views within OPEC. Since he became president, and especially after the failed referendum against him, Chavez (Venezuela's president) has a strategy of trying to isolate the USA. Currently almost all Venezuelan oil is exported to the USA, but the Financial Times recently wrote: "A team of traders from Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the state-owned oil company, is to be trained in London by Iranian advisers in how to best place oil in Asian markets.") Suggested reading: Kenneth Pollack's "The Persian Puzzle" (2004). Back to the world news | Top of this page (February 2005) Long-live America. After the Iraqi elections, Iran's former president and front-runner for the forthcoming Iranian elections, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, granted a rare interview to a USA magazine, USA Today. That per se would have been a major event. But it was eclipsed by what Rafsanjani had to say: instead of the usual anti-American propaganda, he used a conciliatory to, basically, highlight that now the USA and Iran have interests in common. If he wins the elections and becomes again president of Iran, Rafsanjani is basically asking the USA for a chance to improve relations. He is also known as a businessman, a man who never approved of the ayatollah's anti-capitalistic programs. If the ayatollahs let him become president, they will indirectly signal that, no matter what the Quran says, maybe it is time to bring back some business to Iran. In fact, the ayatollahs have already signaled this desire in the past, increasing commercial relationships with Beijing (mainland China), Russia and the European Union. But now they may be faced with the usual reality: everybody else is a dwarf compared with the USA. At the same time, the events that followed September 11 have dramatically altered the scenario of the Middle East. To start with, Iran's number two and number three enemies are both gone: the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Ironically, it was the USA (Iran's number one enemy) that removed them from power. Ironically, the USA-supported democratic governments of Afghanistan and Iraq are both likely to create a much more friendlier political and economic environment with Iran than their predecessors. Suddenly, Iran sees itself in a much better position thanks precisely because to the USA. The elections in Iraq have even returned Iraq to the Shiites, an event of historical significance (Mesopotamia had been shiites for centuries before the British created Iraq and gave it to a Sunni king). From the point of view of the ayatollahs, it is also highly significant that an ayatollah, Sistani, is now wielding power in Iraq, and that the new government will be a lot more "moral" than Saddam's. Qaddafi has changed side, allying himself with the USA and Britain. Qaddafi was Iran's best ally in the terrorist attacks of the 1980s (for example, the bomb on the Panam flight). He has now "repented", and abandoned his old friends in Tehran. The death of Arafat has opened the way to peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, and finally the USA seems to be committed to make it happen: two states living next to each other in peace. Iran's main reason to support terrorism would evaporate overnight. There is international pressure (not only American) for Syria to get out of Lebanon and abandon the Hezbollah guerrillas. They are the main Iranian-backed group in the world. These three events alone are enough to dramatically alter the ayatollah's perception of the USA: far from being the devil, the USA has made the Middle East a much friendlier place (at least for Iran). Why should Iran continue to have a hostile relationship towars the country that has made its life easier, and that also turns out to be the world's superpower? Thus it makes sense that Rafsanjani wants to seize the opportunity. If the Palestinians can make peace with Israel, why can't Iran make peace with the USA? Removing Saddam Hussein may yield an even better divident than the USA had originally anticipated. The ayatollahs became famous for the "Death to America" slogan: is it time to change it to "Long-live America"? Back to the world news | Top of this page (November 2004) Why a deal with Iran is not good news. The European Union, acting on behalf of the USA (and with the implicit help of the threat of USA and/or Israeli military intervention), has worked out a deal with Iran which basically helps the Iranian regime in return for a promise to stop its nuclear program. This is the good old approach "you don't threaten me, I let you oppress your own people" that has failed over and over again. It failed with Hitler, it failed with Stalin, it failed with North Korea, it failed with the Taliban and it failed with Saddam Hussein. But we are ready to do it again, on exactly the same terms. We keep missing the fundamental issue. In a democracy, there are opposition parties and independent media that can denounce the regime if it fails to comply with the treaties it signed. We had American newspapers unveil scandals involving Nixon, Reagan and Clinton. We had former Bush collaborators publish books that criticize Bush. We have a constant barrage of anti-Bush criticism from the Democratic Party. But we don't have, and will not have, any criticism of the regime in totalitarian regimes such as Iran. Who in Iran is going to complain publicly if the ayatollahs violate this treaty? Both on moral and on political grounds, there should never be compromises with totalitarian regimes. It is wrong to abandon the Iranian people to the oppression of their regime. It is naive and dangerous to trust that the Iranian regime will comply with the treaties it signs. We had to fight wars such as WW2 and the Gulf Wars precisely because the West tried to appease totalitarian regimes that simply used the West's appeasament policies to get more and more dangerous. Any deal with a dictator is a bad deal. Period. Back to the world news | Top of this page (October 2004) How the USA funds the dictatorships of Iran and China. As the voracious western and eastern economies send the price of oil to historic highs, the USA finds itself unable to stop a vicious loop. As oil prices increase, oil producers cash in. In particular, Iran is getting a lot of hard currency, a fact which has largely sterilized the pro-democracy movement (people with a fat belly don't want to risk their lives). And the ayatollahs have enough spare change to purchase arms from the international arms dealer and to fund a nuclear program with help from Beijing, one of the main purchasers of Iranian oil. Basically, the bidirectional loop works like this: the USA buys cheap goods from Beijing, which receives dollars and jobs from the USA; Beijing buys oil from Iran, which receives dollars and technology from Beijing; Iran buys weapons and pays dollars to the international arm dealers; Beijing is also left with some dollars, that it uses to purchase USA bonds and stocks; the international arm dealers are left with a lot of dollars, that they can use to support lobbies in Washington. Beijing is rapidly becoming the second economic power in the world. Its high-tech products can't sell in the USA, but are appealing to countries such as Iran. Beijing sells junk to the USA but strategic know-how to Iran. And Beijing uses the dollars to purchase USA bonds and stocks, i.e. to gain an ominous power to influence USA policies. THe USA is paying for both: USA workers lose their jobs while foreigners buy a larger share of the USA reconomy,. The last link is the scariest: international arms dealers are getting rich enough to afford lobbies in Washington with the purpose of influencing USA policy in the world. Americans are not only losing control of the ir jobs and companies: they are also losing control of their government. Back to the world news | Top of this page (August 2004) Iran's need for nuclear weapons The USA has almost completely surrounded Iran: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq have all been "Americanized" to some extent after September 11. (From a strategic point of view, Osama Bin Laden has caused more damaged to the two Islamic regimes of the area than anyone else: the Taliban regime is gone, and the regime of the Ayatollahs in Iran has never been so isolated). Turkey and Armenia are both strong USA ally. USA soldiers are also based just across the strait ub the Arab emirates. It is difficult to blame the ayatollahs for feeling insecure these days. It is also a little unfair to expect that Iran would not nurture nuclear ambitions, given that it is situated in one of the most nuclear-ized areas of the world (India, Pakistan, Israel and Russia are all nuclear powers). If history repeats itself, Iran will not abandon its nuclear program unless a) the regime collapses or b) the USA forces it to. There is virtually no country in history that abandoned a rearmament program out of good will or just because of sanctions. The world has three options: live with a nuclear Iran (neither Israel nor probably the Arab neighbors will accept this idea), foster regime change (which these days cannot happen without foreign intervention) or take military action (which basically means either Israel or the USA bombs Iran). This crisis comes at an odd time. Iran is relatively rich, thanks to the booming oil prices: for the first time in many years, the Iranian middle class is actually doing quite well (and living quite decadent lives, by the standards of their Islamic leaders). The USA has removed the two regimes that Iran truly hated: the Taliban (Iran was the only country to have opposed militarily the Taliban, way before September 11) and Saddam Hussein (who invaded Iran in the 1980s). In fact, Iran helped the USA in both cases, albeit in a very discrete manner. And now Iran, the leading shiite country in the world, enjoys excellent relations with the new leader of Afghanistan (Karzai) and sees a time when Iraq will be ruled by a fellow Shiite (Shiites are the majority of Iraq's population). It sounds like an ideal time for making peace with the USA, which has made all of this possible. Instead, the Iranian leaders have chosen to build a nuclear weapon: from their point of view, the positive changes in Afghanistan and Iraq were not due to the USA, but they are signs of the will of Allah. And peace with the infidels is not the will of Allah. Back to the world news | Top of this page |
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