This winter, President Rafael Correa, of Ecuador, a protégé of Chávez, came to Tehran to sign a number of trade deals. At the ceremony, Correa, a big man, arranged himself on a sofa in an expansive, loose-limbed way. Ahmadinejad looked scrawny beside him; he wore a cardigan and a rumpled gray suit. He smiled at odd moments, and seemed awkward, unsure of what to say. They were like a mismatched bride and groom in an arranged marriage. Correa struck all the right notes for a foreign leader hopeful of obtaining financial credits from Iran. “We consider Iranians a heroic people who knew how to rid themselves of a bloody dictatorship that was backed by the West,” he said. “This example inspires us in Latin America.” Looking pleased, Ahmadinejad turned to Correa, embraced him, and exclaimed, “I’ve found a new friend, and I am not going to lose him now.”
“At the university, Ahmadinejad was very active in the Basij organization, and when the reformists came to power in 1997, with Khatami, he used to make problems for the professors and come to class with a kaffiyeh, to show his solidarity with the Palestinian cause,” Hadian said.
A senior Iraqi politician who has met Ahmadinejad a number of times said that, at a meeting in Tehran two years ago, Ahmadinejad spoke about little but the Mahdi. The politician heard from others that Ahmadinejad had blueprints for a planned triumphal superhighway and reception point in Tehran, to be built for the Mahdi’s eventual arrival.
Mohammad Ali Ramin advises Ahmadinejad on the Holocaust and is said to have shaped the President’s views on the subject. One morning this winter, Ramin met me and an interpreter on the campus of the Message of Light University, in Tehran, where he teaches comparative philosophy. We sat outdoors, in a cabana, with cement stools that were made to look like tree stumps. Ramin is a tall man in his fifties, unusually fair for an Iranian, with thinning blond hair and a clipped blond beard. He lived and worked in Germany for many years—as what, he wouldn’t say.
Ramin explained that the prevailing history of the Holocaust was unfair. The West, he said, had transferred its “Jewish problem” to the Middle East. “But it seems that the U.S. and other Western governments have finally decided to get rid of the Jews,” Ramin said. “By bringing Hitler, and by taking the Jews to the Muslim world, they have created a situation in which the Jews will be destroyed. They have created a situation where, because they are killing Palestinians, the Jews are more hated than ever.” He put on his glasses, and, for the first time, met my eyes. “And so you can see that Israel has been created to destroy not only Muslims but the Jews themselves.”
It had grown cold, but Ramin was reluctant to bring us to his office. Finally, looking unhappy, he led us in, glancing around as he entered. As we sat in front of his desk, Ramin informed me that the Jews had carried out the 9/11 attacks. “The Zionists have blamed it on the Muslims so that they have an excuse to attack some Muslim nations,” he said. But it was all for naught. The Jews had also helped Nero, and it had not saved the Roman Empire from collapse.
A large bookcase ran the length of the wall behind Ramin’s desk. A couple of pictures propped up on one of the shelves caught my eye. One was of Imad Mugniyah, the Hezbollah commander, who was killed in a car-bomb explosion in Damascus, in February, 2008. The other depicted a group of men, Orthodox Jews, silhouetted against a yellow background. Loops of Farsi script ran in red across the base of the picture. When Ramin was called to the door for a moment, I asked my interpreter to quickly translate the words on the picture. He said, “It says ‘money-grubbers, bloodsuckers.’ ”
And, from the "realist" standpoint, perhaps the most important passages:
How much power Ahmadinejad actually wields in the complex structure of the Iranian state is not transparent at all. There is no one more powerful than Ayatollah Khamenei, who has been Supreme Leader, the country’s paramount religious and political authority and the commander-in-chief of its armed forces, since Khomeini’s death, in 1989. Ahmadinejad requires the approval of the Majlis, or parliament, to pass laws; Khamenei can issue a fatwa. After his election, Ahmadinejad publicly kissed Khamenei’s hand, demonstrating his fealty. Hossein Shariatmadari, who is the Supreme Leader’s representative and the editor of Kayhan, the newspaper of the clerical establishment, said, “Mr. Ahmadinejad, you know, is only the head of the implementation in Iran.”
Their relationship is more complicated than that. On one visit I made to Tehran, with Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani, in December, 2006, Iraqi officials who were present for the highest-level meetings told me that Ahmadinejad had been deferential with the Supreme Leader, but that the two men clearly worked closely together. One of Talabani’s senior aides recounted a significant moment. Talabani had given a blunt assessment of the situation in Iraq; at the time, Shiite-Sunni sectarian killings were at their height, and Iranian-backed militias were heavily involved. As Talabani described the violence, Khamenei repeatedly exclaimed, “Oh, how terrible! We are praying for you.” Finally, Talabani interrupted him: “What we need is not prayers, we need medicine.” Khamenei replied, “I will provide the prayers and he”—he gestured to Ahmadinejad—“will provide the medicine.”
“We can guess ourselves silly about the intricacies of Iranian politics,” Lee Hamilton said, “but we will never really know the truth.” Vali Nasr added, “Even Khamenei’s authority is constrained by a whole web of relationships.”
Thomas Pickering, a former Under-Secretary of State, who has been meeting with Iranians in an effort to help formulate a new U.S. policy approach, said, “In talking with the Iranians for several years, we have discovered that it’s difficult to know for certain the Iranians’ internal political architecture. There’s no way to have the tight intelligence to know when the right or wrong time to try talking with them might be. With the opacity of their system, it’s always going to be a kind of crapshoot.”
It's clear that, whatever your personal feelings about the Iranian president, he is a complex individual. And it also seems hard not to consider that a serious drawback when it comes to dealing with Iranian nuclear ambitions.
There is a consensus I see developing among blog-people that Iran doesn't really want a nuclear weapon--that they mean what they say when they promise to use nuclear technology for energy purposes only. That consensus has been built on a few precepts, among them:
1. That Ahmadinejad's rhetoric advocating violence against Israel is just rhetoric, or that if it is not, anyway he has no actual power in the Iranian government; and
2. That despite some appearances Iran is a sensibly-governed, democratic state that has nothing to gain from a nuclear weapon, because it recognizes the futility of a nuclear strike on Israel; and anyway
3. Even if Iran does desire a nuclear weapon, we have no clear path to stopping them, and therefore we are better served distancing ourselves from a hard-line Israeli government too prone, in the proud Middle Eastern tradition, to shooting its mouth off.
Number three is indisputable; fine. But we certainly have a lot to think about when it comes to these other assumptions. That Ahmadinejad is a fundamentalist is no well-kept secret. But was I alone in understanding his role in the actual governance of Iran to be extremely limited? I seem to recall repeated references to his position as "figurehead" of Khameini's regime--a description that seems wholly ridiculous, if this profile is to be believed.
I'm no fan of Benjamin Netanyahu, or the Likud generally--but his interview with Jeff Goldberg last month looks a bit less war-mongery in light of some of this reporting, I think.
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