Why U.S. Neocons Want Ahmadinejad to Win

By Stephen Zunes, AlterNet. Posted June 17, 2009.

This obsession has been made easier by Ahmadinejad's anti-Israel rhetoric, although his views are not nearly as extreme as they have been depicted.

For example, Ahmadinejad never actually threatened to "wipe Israel off the map," nor has he demonstrated a newly hostile Iranian posture toward the Jewish state. Not only is this oft-quoted statement a mistranslation -- the idiom does not exist in Farsi, and the reference was to the dissolution of the regime, not the physical destruction of the nation -- the Iranian president was quoting from a statement by Ayatollah Khomeini from nearly 25 years ago.

At that time, however, the Reagan administration was quietly supporting Iran with clandestine arms shipments, so such statements were played down here in the United States. Now that this alleged quote serves a convenient political purpose to exaggerate the supposed Iranian threat, however, it has conveniently been repeated over and over to make the case that, should Iran obtain a nuclear weapon, Ahmadinejad would somehow launch a suicidal nuclear attack against Israel, regardless of the inevitable Israeli nuclear retaliation and despite the fact that Ahmadinejad would have no control over Iranian nukes or missiles anyway.

This incessant claim that he has "vowed to wipe Israel off the map" keeps emanating from the lips of American politicians of both parties despite Ahmadinejad's subsequent clarifications that it is "not Iran's intention to destroy Israel" and that the future he envisioned of the nonexistence of the Israeli state (the more literal translation) was comparable to the dissolution of the Soviet Union: That is, it is no longer on a map because it no longer exists as a state, not because the country was physically destroyed.

The double-standard on the nuclear issue is but one part of U.S. policy that has allowed Ahmadinejad to play the nationalist card to his advantage.

For example, the U.S. government has blamed Iran for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq, yet 95 percent of U.S. casualties have been from anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents.

The U.S. government has focused on Iranian human rights abuses while continuing to arm and support the even more oppressive and theocratic Islamic regime in Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. government attacks the Iranian president's denial of the genocide of European Jews while remaining silent in the face of Turkish leaders' continued denial of the genocide of Armenians.

The U.S. government raises concerns about Iran's apparent election fraud while remaining silent in the face of rigged presidential elections by such allied governments as Egypt and Azerbaijan and the complete lack of national elections in such allied countries as Saudi Arabia and Oman.

It is highly unlikely that Ahmadinejad actually won the majority of the vote in Friday's Iranian election, certainly not the 63 percent granted to him by the Interior Ministry he controls.

However, he and other hard-liners have been able to dominate the country as much as they have in large part as a result of their ability to play on the overwhelming resentment of Iranians from across the ideological spectrum regarding U.S. policy toward their country, ranging from the overthrow of their last truly democratic government by the CIA back in 1953, through the quarter-century of support for the shah's oppressive rule, to the shortsighted and hypocritical policies of more recent years.

Americans have many legitimate concerns regarding Iranian policies, Ahmadinejad's inflammatory rhetoric, and the apparent stealing of the presidential election. However, as long as U.S. policy appears to be based upon such opportunistic double standards rather than consistent principles, Ahmadinejad's inflammatory rhetoric will continue to find an audience, and the hard-liners will still be able to play on the fears and resentments of the Iranian people in their efforts to cling to power.

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Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chairman of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

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