[Mb-civic] Bush's misbegotten Iran plan - Sarah Chayes, Amir Sheikholeslami - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Bush's misbegotten Iran plan

By Sarah Chayes and Amir Soltani Sheikholeslami  |  April 28, 2006  |  
The Boston Globe

IN AN ARTICLE titled ''The Iran Plans," published in a recent issue of 
The New Yorker, Seymour M. Hersh -- who helped bring the Abu Ghraib 
prison scandal to light -- examines what appear to be well-advanced 
White House plans for a bombing campaign against Iran. Such bombing, 
according to his findings, might include the use of ''tactical" nuclear 
weapons, for it seems that Iran's recently elected president, Mahmoud 
Ahmadinejad, is a ''potential Adolf Hitler."

Though any story based on deliberate leaks is open to a certain 
skepticism -- who is doing the leaking; what is their real objective -- 
elements in Hersh's article ring a painful bell. He alleges that 
President Bush's ultimate goal in his confrontation with Iran is, once 
again, regime change and that the president believes that ''saving Iran 
will be his legacy."

Far from saving Iran, if he goes ahead with this plan, Bush will be 
hailed as the savior of Islamic fundamentalism.

Surely recent United States experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has made 
one fact clear: US military action is not an efficient tool for 
defeating religious extremism or promoting democracy.

In Afghanistan, disgust at warlords whom the US military signed up as 
proxies and then ushered into positions of power has much of the 
exasperated population cursing the very word ''democracy" and harking 
back nostalgically to the Taliban era as one of at least some law and 
order. Now, when Taliban knock on village doors at night asking for 
succor, few see a reason to risk denying it.

Iraq is a disaster beyond telling. The White House's obstinate refusal 
to plan for anything but a best-case scenario and its conscious 
manipulation of ethnic divisions -- a tactic that is also reportedly 
part of the Iran plans -- has brought the country to the brink of civil war.

To assume that an American bombing campaign would trigger a spontaneous 
uprising and endear the United States to the Iranian people is to 
fantasize -- once again.

The effect would be the opposite. US bombing is perhaps the only thing 
that would force Iran's frustrated, energetic, sophisticated, largely 
young population to rally round its discredited leaders. And this is why 
the Iranian government is so assiduously waving the red flag of its 
nuclear ambitions in front of the American bull. Because it knows that 
only prompt US military action could save it from the humiliation its 
own population is preparing.

What remains of Iran's Islamic Republic today is an illusion -- a facade 
of faith supported by deceitful rhetoric. And all Iran knows it. The 
regime is out of support.

Ironically, it is not the American Great Satan that has so successfully 
gutted the Islamic Republic, but Iranian leaders themselves. They have 
stripped it of religious as well as political legitimacy.

First Mohammad Khatami, hailed at home and abroad as a reformer, 
promised to expand civil liberties and break the political monopoly of 
so-called rogue ministries. Instead, he stood by while Iran's hardliners 
cracked down on the universities, silenced the press, and rigged 
parliamentary elections. No wonder disappointed Iranians wanted him out 
of office.

His successor, Ahmadinejad, presented the Iranian people with another 
Faustian bargain by promising to break the economic monopoly of Iran's 
corrupt religious establishment, personified by his wealthy opponent, 
Iran's former president Hashemi Rafsanjani. But, once in office 
Ahmadinejad demonstrated his affection for the poor by authorizing a 
crackdown on union leaders representing striking bus drivers.

Against this backdrop of manifestly bankrupt policies, the clash over 
nuclear enrichment has been a godsend for Iran's fundamentalist clergy, 
for it is allowing them to shed their religious skins and don the cloak 
of nationalism.

The only obstacle to Iran's emergence as an economic and political 
superpower, according to the myth the government is trying to spin for 
internal consumption, would seem to be the shortage of electricity 
caused by the absence of enriched uranium. The scarcity, poverty, 
misery, and depression the country has suffered under the ayatollahs are 
supposedly due to this one lack.

Like the genie buried in Aladdin's lamp, ''Imam Uraniumullah" is 
expected to restore the faith by capturing the energy of matter and 
harnessing it to the country's development. Or -- for the vast majority 
of the Iranian population that sees through that cant -- enrichment, by 
helping Iran accede to the world's most select club, will provide the 
people with some ineffable sense of grandeur that could make up for all 
the rest.

Instead of puncturing the myth and watching the Islamic Republic fizzle 
out like an empty balloon, ''the Iran plan" legitimizes and solidifies 
the ideological and emotional foundations of the Iranian ayatollahs' 
rule. For, if acted upon, it would permit the Islamic Republic to cover 
up its crimes beneath the corpses of new ''martyrs," while blaming its 
own myriad failures on the United States.

Rather than stepping into such an obvious lose-lose situation, President 
Bush should consider that it is not his bunker busting nuclear arsenal 
that can shake the ground beneath the Islamic Republic, but the Iranian 
people. After all, it is neither the United States and Israel, nor the 
United Nations and its membership, nor the continent of Europe, but the 
Iranian people who are the primary targets and principle foes of Iran's 
supreme leader and his faith in death and duplicity.

Sarah Chayes, a former National Public Radio reporter, has been working 
in Afghanistan since 2002. Amir Soltani Sheikholeslami is an 
Iranian-born human rights activist.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/04/28/bushs_misbegotten_iran_plan/
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