Ahmadinejad: Hitler Or George Clooney?

The results of Iran's local elections are still being tabulated, but headlines around the world agree they represent a sharp rebuke by the Iranian public of their president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Up until now, Ahmadinejad has skillfully parlayed populist economic promises and Quixotic foreign policy speeches into a heroic stature, not only at home but throughout the Muslim world and everywhere Third World countries feel like standing up to their larger and wealthier Western rivals. But with a 65 percent turnout rate, Iranians all but assured the election of many of Ahmadinejad's rivals—both leftists and "pragmatic conservatives."

In a brilliant essay in The New York Times' Sunday "Week in Review" written before the results of the vote were in, journalist Neil MacFarquhar explores how Ahmadinejad works—and why U.S. and Israeli demonization of him, across the political spectrum, plays right into his hands. From MacFarquhar's piece :

Being seen confronting the West burnishes Mr. Ahmadinejad’s populist image at home and adds to his aura on the Arab street, feeding the mullahs’ dreams of leading the world’s Muslims.

“They say Ahmadinejad is standing up to the Americans, he is standing up to the Israelis, and he is defending our rights,” Akhbar Ganji, Iran’s leading dissident, said in a talk at Stanford University this fall. But Mr. Ganji and a number of other Iranian analysts say that the West falls into a trap when it lets Mr. Ahmadinejad set the parameters of any dialogue or even interviews. ...

“When Mr. Ahmadinejad makes these points we should remind him that he has no right to say anything because look at your system—this is a system where stoning is still legal,” [author Azar] Nafisi said. “All the talk is about Mr. Ahmadinejad, he’s become the George Clooney of the political world. I think he’s having the best time of his life.”

MacFarquhar also does an excellent job of assembling what an alternative policy could look like:

But Iranian analysts interviewed in America mostly view a military strike as the surest means to cement the regime in power. Some question the wisdom of negotiating now, arguing that the West has so demonized Mr. Ahmadinejad and Iran as threats to peace that the Islamic Republic will believe in its own superpower ratings and not feel pressed to make concessions. “It is very optimistic to believe that in this situation any real negotiations can take place,” said Mehdi Khaliji, a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute.

With Iran, the United States needs to become both more confrontational in private, and less bellicose publicly, he said. For example, rather than threatening regime change and not doing much to back it up, he said, the American military should have come down hard on Iranian interference in Iraq while sounding more diplomatic in public. That approach would make Iran more amenable to compromise, he said. ...

Aside from talking to Iran to seek common ground on Iraq, the United States could do two other things to help hobble the radical impulses within the Islamic Republic, the analysts say.

First, they suggest making a greater distinction between individual Iranians and their government. They cite the treatment of about 120 prominent Iranian academics who tried to enter the United States last summer to attend a reunion of alumni from Sharif Industrial University, Iran’s most prestigious scientific university. They all had valid visas, but American border agents, alarmed by a sudden rise in Iranian arrivals, deported about half of them.

Second, Mr. Ganji said, Washington could concentrate on settling the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, which he said is fodder for religious extremism. As long as that rages, he said, Iran’s rulers will try to exploit it to distract people from their domestic mess.

As usual, the Bush administration is doing everything it can to make matters worse, out of their mistaken belief that backing extremists into a corner will subdue them rather than provoke violent response. Nuance and subtlety are needed.

Good luck.