[Mb-civic] Axis of Fanatics: Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad By Norman Solomon

[Michael Butler]

    Axis of Fanatics: Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad
    By Norman Solomon
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Friday 06 January 2006

    With Ariel Sharon out of the picture, Benjamin Netanyahu has a better
chance to become prime minister of Israel.

    He's media savvy. He knows how to spin on American television. And he's
very dangerous.

    Netanyahu spent a lot of his early years in the United States. Later,
during the 1980s, he worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and then
became Israel's ambassador to the United Nations. By the time he moved up to
deputy foreign minister in 1988, he was a star on US networks.

    The guy is smooth - fluent in American idioms, telegenic to many eyes -
and good at lying on camera. So, when Israeli police killed 17 Palestinians
at Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque in October 1990, Netanyahu led a
disinformation blitz asserting that the Palestinians were killed after
they'd rioted and pelted Jewish worshipers from above the Wailing Wall with
huge stones. At the time, his fable dominated much of the US media. Later,
even the official Israeli inquiry debunked Netanyahu's account and blamed
police for starting the clash.

    Now, with Netanyahu campaigning to win the Israeli election for prime
minister in late March, he's cranking up rhetoric against Iran. His outlook
seems to be 180 degrees from the world view of Iran's president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. Yet in tangible political ways, they're well-positioned to feed
off each other's fanaticism.

    The election that gave the presidency of Iran to Ahmadinejad last summer
was a victory for repressive fundamentalism. Results have included a
negative trend for human rights in the country and a more bellicose foreign
policy.

    When Ahmadinejad declared in late October that "Israel must be wiped off
the map," he did a big favor to the most militaristic of Israel's major
politicians - Benjamin Netanyahu - who demanded that Prime Minster Sharon
take forceful action against Iran. Otherwise, Netanyahu said in December,
"when I form the new Israeli government, we'll do what we did in the past
against Saddam's reactor, which gave us 20 years of tranquillity."

    Netanyahu was referring to Israel's air attack on the Osirak reactor in
June 1981 to prevent Iraq from developing nuclear weapons. But now the idea
of bombing Iran is nonsensical even to many analysts who are enthusiastic
about Israel's large nuclear arsenal, estimated at 200 warheads.

    "Preemptive military attack is not a strategy for stopping the spread of
nuclear weapons anymore; the changes in technology have made it obsolete."
That's the current assessment from Larry Derfner, who often writes about
Israeli politics for the Jerusalem Post. "Concealing a nuclear start-up is
so much easier now than it was in 1981 and it's only going to get easier
yet. Throwing fighter jets, commandos and whatnot at Iran is more than
risky; it's almost certainly futile if not altogether impossible. Better for
Israel and Israelis to forget about it and instead meet the Iranian threat
by making this country's deterrent power even more intimidating than it
already is."

    Derfner added: "A nuclear Iran isn't a cause for indifference but
neither is it a cause for dread and certainly not for recklessness. A
nuclear Iran is actually acceptable. We can live with it. The truth is we've
been living here with threats very much like it all along."

    But Netanyahu has repeatedly emphasized that he wants to launch a
military strike on Iran. "This is the Israeli government's primary
obligation," he said. "If it is not done by the current government, I plan
to lead the next government to stop the Iranians."

    The specter of Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad fueling each other's madness as
heads of state is frightening. In such a circumstance, the primary danger of
conflagration would come from nuclear-armed Israel, not nuclear-unarmed
Iran.

    Candidate Netanyahu is a standard bearer for nuclear insanity. He's also
an implacable enemy of basic Palestinian human rights. Many Israelis
understand that Netanyahu is an extremist, and polls published on January 6
indicate that the post-Sharon era may not be as hospitable to Netanyahu as
initially assumed.

    For that matter, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not serve out his full
four-year term as Iran's president. Evidently the hardline clerics who
dominate the Iranian government got more than they bargained for when they
threw their weight behind the Ahmadinejad campaign last June. In recent
months, Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has shifted more power to the
governmental Expediency Council headed by the shady magnate Hashemi
Rafsanjani, a relatively moderate political hack who lost in the
presidential runoff last year.

    Ahmadinejad is good at making statements that cause international
uproars, but he's having a difficult time exercising presidential leverage.
"Even in Iran's mostly conservative parliament, the hard-line president has
found himself unable to get traction," the Los Angeles Times noted on
January 2. "In a first for the Islamic Republic, lawmakers turned down four
of the ministers Ahmadinejad asked them to approve. It took him three months
and four candidates to seat an oil minister. Some reformist legislators even
agitated for hearings on the president's 'lack of political competence.'"

    Using religious claims to bolster their quests for power, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad and Benjamin Netanyahu each stand to gain by pointing to the
menacing fanaticism of the other. Yet many Iranians and Israelis recognize
the grave dangers of such posturing.

    As tensions mount and pressures intensify, the White House might end up
acceding to an Israeli air attack on Iran. Or the Bush administration may
prefer to launch its own air strike against Iran.

    Iran. Israel. The United States. Each country has the very real
potential to move in a better direction - away from lethal righteousness.
But in every society, that will require more effective grassroots efforts
for peace and justice.