M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmedinejad has this in common with U.S. President George W. Bush and former
British Prime Minister Tony Blair: he too speaks directly to God. Admirers
consider him to be the pilot heralding the imminent return of the Mahdi, the
expected Muslim Messiah.
Less undiscerning observers consider the
president of the Islamic Republic of Iran to be a buffoon, without any
substantive authority inside his own country -- where the key members of the
government report directly to Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Khamenei -- and
with a diminishing support base within his own people, caused by the extreme
economic mismanagement of the mullahs.
A country that ought to have enjoyed a
prosperous standard of living for its 78 million people has huge pools of
extreme poverty, caused by a dysfunctional system reminiscent of India during
the three decades from 1955-85 of comprehensive central planning. What passes
for private industry in Iran is a collection of enterprises run like feudal
fiefs by those close to the supreme leader, or regarded by him as potential
troublemakers needing to be pampered out of opposition.
Ahmedinejad himself came to power
Iran-style, where the counted ballots threw up -- not entirely coincidentally
-- the very result favored by Khamenei, who saw the current Iranian president
as a poodle who would not stray from total obedience the way Ali Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani did during his term. Unfortunately for the wily supreme leader,
Ahmedinejad began to get delusions of divine greatness within a year, even
while proving inept in supervising the system in a manner that would give the
people of Iran enough crumbs to remain quiescent.
As in Myanmar today, spreading economic
disaster is creating opposition to the regime that is pushing close to the
surface. The Iranian president is the subject of lampoons disseminated through
text messages and emails, not a few of which err on the side of overestimating
his intellect and his capabilities.
"Professor" Ahmedinejad has
meandered from mistake to mistake in his New York appearances this week, caused
by as complete a lack of appreciation of the chemistry of the United States as
George W. Bush has vis-a-vis Iraq. Unfortunately for those who wish to see the
Iranian people finally gifted with a government more in sync with their genius,
the public response in the United States and parts of Europe to the Iranian
president has helped to create a sympathy wave for Ahmedinejad within the
region and even among sections of his own people.
Columbia University President Lee
Bollinger, who invited Ahmedinejad to speak at his university Monday, basked in
the admiration of a domestic audience that has since 1979 been fed horror
stories of the mullahs and their servitors -- a substantial part of which is
true. But his unusual judgmental introduction of a guest has helped devalue the
culture of his own country and generated sympathy for Ahmedinejad among the
many countries where a substantial segment of the population regards the United
States as a bully that has stepped clumsily and eagerly into the shoes of their
former European colonizers.
In both Asia and South America there exists
a respect for civility in formal dialogue that was offended by the
near-hysterical tone of the "professor who just happens to be a university
president." Hopefully Sept. 24 was just an off day for Bollinger, as
Saddam-style declamations against those present and invited are not everywhere
the preferred standard of "civilized" behavior.
That Ahmedinejad is himself responsible for
the anger and contempt with which he is regarded across the world does not
mitigate the negative impact of such discourtesy in those parts of the world
that continue to see those of European ethnicity as past and present occupiers
of lands not their own.
Fortunately for his opponents, the
president of Iran gave ample evidence of being intellectually challenged -- for
example by holding on to his historically outrageous assertion that Hitler's
Holocaust was "not proven," or that there was no homosexuality in
Iran. His comments showed insensitivity toward reality that bordered on
fantasy, reinforcing Ahmedinejad's image in the English-speaking world of a
boorish fanatic.
However, his defense of the indefensible
has the capacity to evoke a favorable resonance in much of the Arab world,
where he and his minders intend to recreate the anti-Western public coalition
that was enjoyed for a decade by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser before the 1967 defeat.
The very barbs and boos that were directed at the Iranian head of state by his
U.S. audiences have helped set in stone the image of a Muslim leader who has
the courage to tell the West where to get off. As in the case of Nasser, it may
take a crushing military defeat to remove the growing halo around Mahmoud
Ahmedinejad in the region.
-(Professor M.D. Nalapat is
vice-chair of the Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair, and
professor of geopolitics at Manipal University.)
No comments:
Post a Comment