Everyone's Confused About What's Happening in Iran

By Assaf Kfoury, AlterNet. Posted July 23, 2009.

Close scrutiny of reports in the American media on Iran’s June 12 election reveals a wide range of contradictory and unsubstantiated claims. Some of it is speculation for lack of information, to be sure, but some is also wishful thinking to fit ideological assumptions.

It is not just a matter of left versus right. Contradictory claims have been expressed by people within the same ideological camp. At the end, behind the outrage or the rhetorical flourish, they are not any closer to a consistent account of the Iranian events.

There are many questions that have elicited claims and counter-claims. Who won the June 12 election, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Mir-Hossein Moussavi, is only one such question. Among others are the following: how skewed are the percentages: the 85 percent for voter turnout, the officially announced 63 percent for Ahmadinejad, and the 34 percent for Moussavi? Beyond counting percentages, which of the two major candidates has majority support among the rural poor, or the urban middle class, or the students and the young unemployed? In what way is Moussavi a “reformist”, a “socialist” or a “left Islamist”, as he has been varyingly called -- or is he something else entirely? How is it that Moussavi’s chief backer in the political establishment, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, transmuted from the “most corrupt” mullah (according to frequent past reports in the west) to a “reformist” politician? These are a few among many questions that have produced conflicting answers. Reasonable readers should be excused for being confused.

But so what? From a left perspective in the US, these questions are in fact of little importance, interesting as they may be under different circumstances. They are unrelated to the hard task of building an effective mass movement that can restrain or block the government’s rightwing drift domestically and its bullying in the Middle East and elsewhere. If anything, they have deflected attention from a more important and immediate task facing the anti-war movement: how to counter the very real possibility of an attack on Iran.

For months now, there have been loud claims that Iran’s nuclear program is an “existential threat” to Israel and the rest of the world. This is, of course, utter bunk and very dangerous bombast. Assuming Iran had such a capability, could a nuclear attack against Israel be calibrated so that it will destroy the Israelis but not the Palestinians in their midst (and Iran’s ally, Hamas), and not the Lebanese (and Iran’s ally, Hezbollah) a few kilometers to the north, and not the Jordanians a few kilometers to the east? Could Iran’s nuclear warheads, if they existed and were launched, destroy Israel’s seat of government without incinerating Jerusalem and covering both Arabs and Israelis with radioactive fallout?

For all the declarations about the need to “engage Iran diplomatically” by Obama and his advisors, they are also planning for a possible bombing campaign; no doubt only a fraction of these plans has been revealed to the general public.

 If they carry out the threat of destroying Iran’s nuclear installations - spread over a country larger in size than the UK, France and Germany combined, with a population of 70 million - it will provoke retaliation and bring untold devastation to an already deeply wounded region. This is a far more ominous issue than all the impassioned talks about Iran’s election results.

Below is a sample of American reactions to Iran’s June 12 election and its aftermath. Needless to say, our sample below is illustrative, not exhaustive, moving from right to left across the political spectrum.

Unrepentant neo-cons

From the far right, neo-conservative opinions have been the most homogeneous and therefore the least unexpected. They come from government officials, academics and media commentators -- predictably hawkish, elitist and racist -- with different degrees of chilling recommendations.

Elliott Abrams, deputy national security adviser in the Bush administration, decided before even June 12 that Iran’s presidential election is a “travesty”, because “voting in Iran is a contrivance for settling certain policy disputes and personal rivalries within the ruling elite”. Abrams predicts there will be no significant change in Iran’s conduct after June 12, regardless of who is president. He therefore warns western leaders against “the delusion that a new president would mean new opportunities to negotiate away Iran’s nuclear program”.

After June 12, as violent clashes erupted between the Ahmadinejad and Moussavi camps, neo-cons have consistently reproached the Obama administration for its cautious approach. The latter may be the result of necessity rather than benevolence, with Iraq still burning to the west and Afghanistan heating up to the east. But no matter. Paul Wolfowitz, a former Deputy Secretary of Defense, recommends: “Now is not the time for the president to dig in to a neutral posture. It is time to change course.”

See more stories tagged with: iran, ahmadinejad, moussavi

Assaf Kfoury is Professor of Computer Science at Boston University. He is an Arab American who grew up in Beirut and Cairo, and returns frequently to the Middle East.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from World! Sign up now »