[Mb-civic] FW: 'The Last Helicopter'

[Golsorkhi]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 11:15:59 -0500
Subject: 'The Last Helicopter'



Begin forwarded message:

> 
> 
>  
> 'The Last Helicopter'
> 
> March 29, 2006 
> The Wall Street Journal
> Amir Taheri
> 
> link to original article
> <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB114360603158410910.html>
> 
> Hassan Abbasi has a dream -- a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies
> to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the "fleeing
> Americans," forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by "the Army
> of Muhammad." Presented by his friends as "The Dr. Kissinger of Islam," Mr.
> Abbasi is "professor of strategy" at the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary
> GuardCorps University and, according to Tehran sources, the principal foreign
> policy voice in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new radical administration.
> 
> For the past several weeks Mr. Abbasi has been addressing crowds of Guard and
> Baseej Mustadafin (Mobilization of the Dispossessed) officers in Tehran with a
> simple theme: The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long conflict and will
> soon revert to its traditional policy of "running away," leaving Afghanistan
> and Iraq, indeed the whole of the Middle East, to be reshaped by Iran and its
> regional allies. 
> 
> To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be
> narrated with the help of the image of "the last helicopter." It was that
> image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter
> had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the
> charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the
> helicopters carried the bodies of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a
> Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew
> from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving
> behind Saddam Hussein's generals, who could not believe why they had been
> allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill
> Clinton's helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16
> American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.
> 
> According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an "aberration," a
> leader out of sync with his nation's character and no more than a brief
> nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an "American Middle East."
> Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no helicopter
> as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe that whoever
> succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the helicopter image to
> extricate the U.S. from a complex situation that few Americans appear to
> understand. 
> 
> Mr. Ahmadinejad's defiant rhetoric is based on a strategy known in Middle
> Eastern capitals as "waiting Bush out." "We are sure the U.S. will return to
> saner policies," says Manuchehr Motakki, Iran's new Foreign Minister.
> 
> Mr. Ahmadinejad believes that the world is heading for a clash of
> civilizations with the Middle East as the main battlefield. In that clash Iran
> will lead the Muslim world against the "Crusader-Zionist camp" led by America.
> Mr. Bush might have led the U.S. into "a brief moment of triumph." But the
> U.S. is a "sunset" (ofuli) power while Iran is a sunrise (tolu'ee) one and,
> once Mr. Bush is gone, a future president would admit defeat and order a
> retreat as all of Mr. Bush's predecessors have done since Jimmy Carter.
> 
> Mr. Ahmadinejad also notes that Iran has just "reached the Mediterranean"
> thanks to its strong presence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian
> territories. He used that message to convince Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
> to adopt a defiant position vis-à-vis the U.N. investigation of the murder of
> Rafiq Hariri, a former prime minister of Lebanon. His argument was that once
> Mr. Bush is gone, the U.N., too, will revert to its traditional lethargy.
> "They can pass resolutions until they are blue in the face," Mr. Ahmadinejad
> told a gathering of Hezbollah, Hamas and other radical Arab leaders in Tehran
> last month. 
> 
> According to sources in Tehran and Damascus, Mr. Assad had pondered the option
> of "doing a Gadhafi" by toning down his regime's anti-American posture. Since
> last February, however, he has revived Syria's militant rhetoric and dismissed
> those who advocated a rapprochement with Washington. Iran has rewarded him
> with a set of cut-price oil, soft loans and grants totaling $1.2 billion. In
> response Syria has increased its support for terrorists going to fight in Iraq
> and revived its network of agents in Lebanon, in a bid to frustrate that
> country's democratic ambitions.
> 
> It is not only in Tehran and Damascus that the game of "waiting Bush out" is
> played with determination. In recent visits to several regional capitals, this
> writer was struck by the popularity of this new game from Islamabad to Rabat.
> The general assumption is that Mr. Bush's plan to help democratize the
> heartland of Islam is fading under an avalanche of partisan attacks inside the
> U.S. The effect of this assumption can be witnessed everywhere.
> 
> In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf has shelved his plan, forged under pressure from
> Washington, to foster a popular front to fight terrorism by lifting
> restrictions against the country's major political parties and allowing their
> exiled leaders to return. There is every indication that next year's elections
> will be choreographed to prevent the emergence of an effective opposition. In
> Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, arguably the most pro-American leader in the
> region, is cautiously shaping his post-Bush strategy by courtingTehran and
> playing the Pushtun ethnic card against his rivals.
> 
> In Turkey, the "moderate" Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is
> slowly but surely putting the democratization process into reverse gear. With
> the post-Bush era in mind, Mr. Erdogan has started a purge of the judiciary
> and a transfer of religious endowments to sections of the private sector
> controlled by his party's supporters. There are fears that next year's general
> election would not take place on a level playing field.
> 
> Even in Iraq the sentiment that the U.S. will not remain as committed as it
> has been under Mr. Bush is producing strange results. While Shiite politicians
> are rushing to Tehran to seek a reinsurance policy, some Sunni leaders are
> having second thoughts about their decision to join the democratization
> process. "What happens after Bush?" demands Salih al-Mutlak, a rising star of
> Iraqi Sunni leaders. The Iraqi Kurds have clearly decided to slow down all
> measures that would bind them closer to the Iraqi state. Again, they claim
> that they have to "take precautions in case the Americans run away."
> 
> There are more signs that the initial excitement created by Mr. Bush's
> democratization project may be on the wane. Saudi Arabiahas put its national
> dialogue program on hold and has decided to focus on economic rather than
> political reform. In Bahrain, too, the political reform machine has been put
> into rear-gear, while in Qatar all talk of a new democratic constitution to
> set up a constitutional monarchy has subsided. In Jordan the security services
> are making a spectacular comeback, putting an end to a brief moment of hopes
> for reform. As for Egypt, Hosni Mubarak has decided to indefinitely postpone
> local elections, a clear sign that the Bush-inspired scenario is in trouble.
> Tunisia and Morocco, too, have joined the game by stopping much-advertised
> reform projects while Islamist radicals are regrouping and testing the waters
> at all levels. 
> 
> But how valid is the assumption that Mr. Bush is an aberration and that his
> successor will "run away"? It was to find answers that this writer spent
> several days in the U.S., especially Washington and New York, meeting ordinary
> Americans and senior leaders, including potential presidential candidates from
> both parties. While Mr. Bush's approval ratings, now in free fall, and the
> increasingly bitter American debate on Iraq may lend some credence to the
> "helicopter" theory, I found no evidence that anyone in the American
> leadership elite supported a cut-and-run strategy.
> 
> The reason was that almost all realized that the 9/11 attacks have changed the
> way most Americans see the world and their own place in it. Running away from
> Saigon, the Iranian desert, Beirut, Safwan and Mogadishu was not hard to sell
> to the average American, because he was sure that the story would end there;
> the enemies left behind would not pursue their campaign within theU.S. itself.
> The enemies that America is now facing in the jihadist archipelago, however,
> are dedicated to the destruction of the U.S.as the world knows it today.
> 
> Those who have based their strategy on waiting Mr. Bush out may find to their
> cost that they have, once again, misread not only American politics but the
> realities of a world far more complex than it was even a decade ago. Mr. Bush
> may be a uniquely decisive, some might say reckless, leader. But a visitor to
> the U.S. soon finds out that he represents the American mood much more than
> the polls suggest.
> 
> Mr. Taheri is author of "L'Irak: Le Dessous Des Cartes" (Editions Complexe,
> 2002).
> 
>  
> 



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