CE Week #9: “Stalin, Mao And … Ahmadinejad?”
Conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history’s greatest mass murderers.
By Fareed Zakaria
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 1:57 PM ET Oct 20, 2007
At a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.
The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.” For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.
Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?
When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn’t have a nuclear button yet and won’t for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)
In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can’t be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a “residual rationality,” he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history’s greatest mass murderers.
If I had to choose whom to describe as a madman, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il or Ahmadinejad, I do not think there is really any contest. A decade ago Kim Jong Il allowed a famine to kill 2 million of his own people, forcing the others to survive by eating grass, while he imported gallons of expensive French wine. He has sold nuclear technology to other rogue states and threatened his neighbors with test-firings of rockets and missiles. Yet the United States will be participating in international relief efforts to Pyongyang worth billions of dollars.
We’re on a path to irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about. The United States government has had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30 years. American officials have barely met with any senior Iranian politicians or officials. We have no contact with the country’s vibrant civil society. Iran is a black hole to us—just as Iraq had become in 2003.
The one time we seriously negotiated with Tehran was in the closing days of the war in Afghanistan, in order to create a new political order in the country. Bush’s representative to the Bonn conference, James Dobbins, says that “the Iranians were very professional, straightforward, reliable and helpful. They were also critical to our success. They persuaded the Northern Alliance to make the final concessions that we asked for.” Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence. The then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he says, “looked down and rustled his papers.” No reply was ever sent back to the Iranians. Why bother? They’re mad.
Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, “is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to ‘the farthest mosque,’ usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world” (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/57346
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I believe that we need to take a strong stance with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This article says that Iran has an annual defensive budget of $4.8 billion and the United States has defensive expenditures of 110 times greater. I do not think that Iran’s President is going to cooperate much with the United States. From other articles is seems like he is just messing around with us. Dick Cheney seems to have been more defensive of the United States and I think that is good because we have the resources to overpower Iran and making this evident would hopefully be to our benefit. It scares me to hear, however, that if Iran gains knowledge on nuclear weapons than World War III could possibly occur. “…if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” Hopefully we can keep Iran’s hands off of any nuclear intelligence or Bush seems to say that things could get ugly. I do not know how difficult it is to gain knowledge on those kinds of things, but if that is all they need than I am very concerned. Hopefully, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fails as President and is unsuccessful in gaining knowledge or we may need to take the nuclear offensive, which I think we all could live without. It is reassuring however, to hear that we have allies in that area.
Why would you want to invade Iran? The article said that they didn’t yet have the knowledge of nuclear weapons, so what would be the point? It would be bad if Ahmadinejad became another Hitler or Mao. The country doesn’t need to be conquered by another psycho religious race, like Islamofascism. Besides if the facts in the article are correct, Iran is a very poor country. Its economy is equal to that of Finland. Their budget for their nation defense is $4.8 billion. Quite frankly, the United States budget for National Defense is 110 times greater than theirs, so if we wanted to we could wipe them off the face of the earth if we wanted to (but that probably wouldn’t be the best idea). Plus even if Iran wanted to become a super power and rally all the other Arab nations it wouldn’t work. The Arab superpower consists of Iraq and Syria (oh man I’m so scared). The only way those little countries would be able to wipe us out is if they had weapons of mass destruction. (The whole reason that we went into Iraq was to find weapons of mass destruction but we didn’t find any so we don’t have to worry about them.) Iran doesn’t have the economic and military stability that is needed to become a superpower and take over the world. Iran would mostly likely wipe out the world before they took it over, and since they don’t have any nuclear weapons that would be kind of hard. So I guess I really don’t see why the Bush Administration is freaking out about Iran.
I like people who use facts in their arguments. I like Fareed Zakaria.
Tiara, I don’t understand why you ignored everything Zakaria said and chose to focus on the Bush quotes instead. Zakaria spent the entire article asserting the utter inanity of the Bush administration’s propaganda regarding Iran. If you disagree with the author, say so, but it might be a good idea to demonstrate that you read the article in question.
Zakaria effectively demonstrates that Iran poses little threat to us. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while probably crazy, is no Josef Stalin. And comparing present-day leaders to historical tyrants is a dangerous pastime. Learn from history, and recognize when yesterday’s archetypes resurface, but back up your assertions with valid evidence. Invoking the name of Hitler or the threat of World War III without supporting that claim is really just fear-mongering. I’ve heard it said that public officials talking about military action against Iran are insulting the intelligence of the American public. I wonder if our intelligence doesn’t deserve some insulting. Has our collective political amnesia become so bad that most people do not remember President Bush & Co. using the same rhetoric to convince us that war on Iraq was necessary? I was thirteen when we attacked Iraq, and I remember. We must not be prodded down the warpath again.
-grace
You’re absolutely right, Grace, we should learn from history. We should learn that crazy people with a lot of power could cause terrible things to happen and kill many people. And I don’t think it’s up to debate that Ahmadinejad is mad, I mean “mad” is right in the middle of his name. This guy says that he wants Israel wiped off the map. He believes he is the equivalent of the anti-christ and will bring on the end of the human race. I think that we need to take the things that he says seriously and prevent him from obtaining the knowledge and technology to build nuclear weapons. I believe that due to our role as a lone super power in the world it is our duty to stop this evil and help people in Israel and the other countries in the world. In fact, we don’t have a choice. We have to take on the role of a super power because if we didn’t our great and beautiful country could not survive.
I would love to go back and stop Stalin and Hitler, and I think the same can be said about Ahmadinejad.
I am definitely going to have to agree with Grace on this one because I really can’t agree with either Tiara or Anthony. First of all, I think that what Anthony said about or responsibilities as “the Lone Superpower” is ridiculous. “I believe that due to our role as a lone super power in the world it is our duty to stop this evil and help people in Israel and the other countries in the world.” I think that this is total bologna! Where do we get off thinking that because we are Americans we are so much better than everyone else? Then to make matters worse, we get so full of ourselves that are view gets so twisted that suddenly invading another country for questionable reasons is “a war on terrorism”, and we are suddenly surprised when we realize that the people in that other country don’t even want us there. How can we be surprised when things don’t work out after we invaded them? On a similar topic, the US is totally hypocritical about nuclear weapons. For some unfathomable reason, we have enough nuclear power to destroy the entire world several times over, but we freak out if another country might gain the merely the knowledge of how to make a nuke. It is ridiculous. Who are we to decide that we are responsible enough to handle nuclear capacities, but no other countries are. We have so much power and won’t allow other countries to gain even a smidgen of it and then we turn around and are surprised that they desire the capability to defend themselves from us. They are scared, and I would be too, especially since the US has the majority of the world’s nuclear capabilities, and is the only country that I know of that have used nukes not once, but twice in warfare.
Andrew Barnes
Once again, I am impressed with the work of Fareed Zakaria. He is a talented writer who tends to put the issues into perspective, especially when we need it. This is especially apparent in the article at hand in which Ahmadinejad was compared to Hitler, and described as being more irrational than Stalin and Mao. As Zakaria says, this is a pretty crazy comparison. As for a “World War III,” I think that is a bit ridiculous as well. A third world war wouldn’t last very long; it would go on until somebody got the balls to drop a nuke, resulting in the subsequent nuking of everybody. Game over. And it is also unfortunate that the U.S. views itself as supreme over all other nations. I think any other country is just as qualified as we are to develop nuclear technology; it is for defense, just as ours is. We freaked out when North Korea did one nuclear test, when the reality of the situation is that we have done more nuclear tests than every other nation combined. Like Zakaria, I think the only person crazy enough to “push the button” is Kim Jong Il. Everybody else understands that a nuke will lead to the inevitable destruction of the world. In fact, KJI probably understands this as well, but doesn’t care.
As Zakaria says, “this would all be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.”
Brian Baker
I would have to disagree with Brian and Barnes (B & B) First, Kim Jong Il is not the only person who is crazy enough to drop a nuke. I hope we didn’t forget Bin Laden. And of course Ahmadinejad, who I said in my last post BELIEVES HE IS THE ANTI-CHRIST.
I think that that alone is reason enough for him to do something that crazy. Also, You have to contradictory statements, Brian. You said “We freaked out when North Korea did one nuclear test, when the reality of the situation is that we have done more nuclear tests than every other nation combined.” And then you said the only person crazy enough to push the button is K.J.I. So I think that that gives us every reason to freak out when his country conducts a nuclear test, is it not? And how is invading a country because they present a threat to national security “questionable reasoning?” We need to attack first. The best defense is a good offense.