Ahmadinejad and the Limits of American and Israeli Power
By Juan Cole
Truthdig: October 11, 2010
Editor's note: We're thrilled to announce the return of Juan Cole, an old
friend who was featured in our first issue and helped forge our mission, to
Truthdig. The past decade has been defined by the West's relationship with
the Middle East. There is no more respected scholar of that region than
Juan, whose writing has brought sanity and insight to a public discourse so
often shaped by ignorance and misinformation. Look for Juan's column every
other Tuesday on Truthdig and be sure to visit his hub, for more.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Middle East's populist answer to
the American tea party, has stirred controversy with his trip to Lebanon,
which will begin Wednesday. He is planning to visit villages in southern
Lebanon on the border with Israel that have been rebuilt with Iranian aid
after Israeli incursions and wars, the last in 2006. Ahmadinejad's
theatrical politics often make him a laughingstock, but his trip is intended
to make the serious point that Tehran can stand up to Western sanctions and
thwart attempts to box the Islamic Republic in.
Ahmadinejad is a major thorn in the side of U.S. President Barack Obama and
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Iran rejects the legitimacy of
Israel, one of the pillars of American policy in the Middle East (though
Ahmadinejad has never actually threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the
map, a charge based on a mistranslation). Iran supports nativist
paramilitaries such as that of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the
Badr Corps in Iraq. Most seriously, Iran is pursuing the enrichment of
uranium, which it says is for civilian power generation. The U.S. and
Israel, however, fear the program could end up being dual-use and result in,
at the least, the ability to assemble a nuclear warhead on short notice.
Iran, despite draconian U.N. and U.S. sanctions, remains a major player in
the region. Shiite Iran has just rallied the Shiite religious parties in
Iraq to support its favored candidate for prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki of
the Islamic Mission Party. Syria and Turkey have warm relations with the
Ahmadinejad government. Even Egypt has just announced a resumption of direct
flights between Cairo and Tehran.
Ahmadinejad's trip to Lebanon was denounced as destabilizing by Israel and
clearly is unwelcome to the United States, which fears it will result in an
arms deal between Beirut and Tehran. Ahmadinejad will meet with all the
leading Lebanese politicians. Most controversially, the Iranian president
will visit Shiite villages right on the border with Israel that have
suffered repeated Israeli incursions and were occupied for nearly two
decades by the Israeli military. Hezbollah fighters, with Iranian backing,
waged a successful guerrilla war against Israeli occupation, resulting in
the first Israeli retreat under fire from territory it had seized in war.
Ahmadinejad has just pledged to invest nearly half a billion dollars in
Lebanon's electricity and water systems to aid the economy, which has grown
8 percent this year and has made impressive strides in rebounding from the
disastrous effects of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War. Iran is a major backer
of the Hezbollah Party, though it does not need Tehran to function.
Hezbollah is a bona fide Lebanese political party and is part of the current
national unity government, with two Cabinet seats and influence over policy.
Its small paramilitary of a few thousand fighters, backed by an arsenal of
small rockets, has been recognized by the Lebanese government as a sort of
national guard for the south of the country. A crisis between Hezbollah and
the government of the Sunni Muslim prime minister, Saad Hariri, looms, since
a tribunal may blame Hezbollah operatives for the 2005 assassination of the
prime minister's father, Rafiq Hariri. Ahmadinejad may hope to broker an
agreement that would forestall civil conflict between Shiites and Sunnis.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah unrealistically credits Iran's aid alone
with Lebanon's impressive economic rebound since the 2006 Israeli war on the
small country. (Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Europe all played important roles
here, as did the resilient tourism sector.) He says that Ahmadinejad
declined to grandstand on that aid, however, quoting the Iranian president
as saying, "I do not want to make the Lebanese feel they are indebted to
Iran," and, "we are the ones who must thank the Lebanese for their
perseverance and for the resistance and for the great victory ..." that they
bestowed on the Muslim world by resisting Israel in 2006. Israel was widely
criticized for deploying disproportionate force when it mounted a massive
bombing campaign on all of Lebanon and its infrastructure in response to a
border skirmish with Hezbollah fighters that had left Israeli soldiers dead.
Iran's ability to thumb its nose at the U.S., Israel and Western Europe is
rooted in its vast petroleum and natural gas reserves. After a difficult
2009 because of the world economic crisis, oil prices are up 15 percent in
2010 on Asian demand. The long-term impact of the new U.N. sanctions
approved June 9 is questionable. South Korea has just found a way to
sidestep the effect of the sanctions on its exports to the Islamic Republic.
China has paid virtually no attention to the U.S. sanctions though it has
slightly reduced its dependence on Iranian petroleum over the past year.
Turkey, which, like South Korea, does $10 billion a year in commerce with
Iran, is openly defiant of the U.N. and U.S. sanctions, and intends to
triple its foreign trade with the Islamic Republic over the next five years.
Turkey has successfully negotiated a free trade zone with Lebanon, and is
seeking to expand it to Jordan and Syria, and Iran will likely benefit from
this European Union-like Middle Eastern trade bloc as well.
The first visit of a president of the Islamic Republic to Beirut signals
that neither the U.S. nor Israel is hegemonic in the region, and that Iran
is willing to brave even a Spartan existence under sanctions for the sake of
its independence and its projection of influence in the Middle East. Right
wing Christian critics of Ahmadinejad's trip charge Tehran with attempting
to signal that Iranian territory extends into southern Lebanon. But many
long-suffering southern Lebanese hope Ahmadinejad will show Israel the new
limits of its power.
Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the
University of Michigan, maintains the blog Informed Comment. His most recent
book, just out in paperback, is Engaging the Muslim World.
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