How Iran Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
By Miguel Guanipa (06/10/06)
Meet Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran. That is a title you get if you beat the world record of most pancakes eaten in one sitting, currently held by David Williams from Kansas. Which is why the Ayatollah had to go a different route and get it by being elected in 1989 by the “Assembly of Experts”, a body comprised of the wisest Mullahs in the neighborhood that decide who will be the next Big Kahuna, with authority to override every other member of the Iranian government, and the last word on many of that country’s foreign policy decisions. To put this in the vernacular, in terms of spiritual hierarchies this means that God is the guy who drives the roach coach from which the Supreme Leader’s administrative assistant gets his cup of coffee in the morning.
The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s primary duty is to oversee the operation of the government to ensure that its policies and actions conform to Islamic principles. He is a spiritual leader whose religious authority is above that of the president and any other officials (think Pat Robertson telling Bush to take Chavez out and Bush saying: I’ll get on it). He is also the guy to whom Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, comes for counsel for his next sound bite.
One of his hallmark decisions involved President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ruling to allow women to attend soccer matches. President Ahmadinejad had made a compromise that women could watch the matches on separate sections from men, but Khamenei vetoed this cosmetic allowance and overturned the entire ruling. This should give you an idea of what being a moderate actually means when one is speaking of Iranian politics.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is that singularly unattractive character who has more than once publicly questioned whether or not the Holocaust really happened as if the answer was open for debate; his personal opinion on Israel is that it needs to be “wiped off the map”. He often refers to the state of Israel as a “fake state” and refuses to recognize its existence. Recently on an interview with Spiegel magazine he was asked if he believed the Holocaust was a Myth, to which he responded: “I will only accept something as truth if I am actually convinced of it”. In general he expresses a belief that Europeans and Americans, riddled with ancestral guilt over their alleged moral culpability for the Holocaust (which is their own historical fabrication), are obliged to support the “Zionists”. Hence he feels great indignation at the fact that countries like Israel and India have been allowed to deviate in their use of nuclear materials for non-peaceful purposes.
It’s no wonder that the current administration feels a little uneasy about the prospect of this guy building a nuclear weapon. Would you give a razor to a three year old and send him out to play outside? By the same token, how comfortable would you feel by allowing a country dominated by Shiites to have nuclear weapons? Keep in mind that this is a contingency that celebrates a religious holiday which involves beating their foreheads with sharpened swords until they are literally bathed in their own blood.
Some experts from the American Foreign Policy Council assert that in less than a year from now Iran will be able to produce at least two nuclear bombs, which they suspect is the reason why President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad restricted the access of U.N. inspectors to its enrichment sites.
Many believe that Iran’s president is merely seeking some respect from the international community via his bellicose pronouncements and he will never make due on his pugnacious rhetoric. They maintain that many of that regime’s conservatives believe that production of a bomb can not be accepted under Islam because a weapon of that nature does not distinguish between the enemy and collateral damage, i.e. innocents. Someone should ask why they do not see a problem with funding terrorist groups like the Hamas or openly supporting Iraq’s suicide bombers whose actions flatly contradict this principle.
The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is well known for a strident anti-west and Islamic fundamentalist policies. As early as August 2002 Khamenei was accusing President Bush of using the same language as Adolph Hitler to bully the world. He openly opposes the Middle East peace process and it is believed some senior Al-Queda suspects are presently enjoying asylum at his behest. There’s no question that he is the one holding the strings in the latest impasse between the U.S. and Iran’s defiant tone about its nuclear ambitions. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is merely a mouthpiece in this affair.
To make matters even more complicated, Khamemei’s chief foreign policy adviser, Ali-Akbar Velayati, believes that the Great Satan “is coming to Iraq to complete its encirclement of our Islamic Republic” and that “to help the Americans conquer Iraq would be suicidal to our revolution”. In short he has clearly stated that the two aims of the US in the Middle East are the prevention of the destruction of Israel and control of Arab oil; pretty much the radical left’s mantra here at home.
But one need not fear, as several U.N. Security Council nations recently reached a tentative compromise for possible sanctions against Iran if it refuses to halt its uranium enrichment programs which it continues to claim is for peaceful purposes. In his typical grandiloquent style when addressing rogue nations Kofi Annan urged Iran to “lift the cloud of uncertainty” surrounding its nuclear project. This proposal also contains the implicit threat of U.N. sanctions if Iran remains defiant. And we all know how well these threats worked with another neighboring ex-potentate.
In the meantime, Iran has already conducted a test launch of the Shihab-3 intermediate-range ballistic missile, which is capable of reaching Israel, whose leadership probably recognizes that while a dog’s bark is sometimes scarier than it’s bite, not many risk approaching a rabid dog to prove this thesis, unless they have adequate safety protection, some kind of trapping device, and a trusty two-barrel rifle if necessary.
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