* <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IJ11Ak02.html> Ahmadinejad scores 'fair' in mid-term report By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
An objective mid-term report on the foreign policy performance of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is called for. According to Ahmadinejad, in his recent speech in New York, "compared to two years ago, Iran's position in the international arena has much strengthened".
On the whole, it is hard to dispute that statement, even though because of the fluid nuclear crisis and the threats of conflict and/or conflict spillover related to Iraq, it is difficult to muster more than a provisional conclusion that may need to be revised if Iran faces serious setbacks in the near future due to those crises.
For now, however, Ahmadinejad and his foreign policy team can take credit for strengthening Iran's position, both regionally and globally. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki had precisely this in mind when he told the Iranian press that Ahmadinejad's recent New York visit was a "success" and Iran managed to introduce a "new perspective" on global issues, relying on "clear logic".
According to Mottaki, "Iran proposed the idea of a structural change of the United Nations and a front for peace solidarity, to expand the anti-war and peace movements at the level of heads of states, and that has been well received by many countries."
For this proposal to succeed, however, an important prerequisite is the adoption of much softer image unencumbered by incendiary rhetoric that alienates potential allies and adds to the arsenal of Iran's opponents, this at a time when Iran can ill-afford missing any effort at threat reduction.
On the nuclear issue, the Ahmadinejad government, while complaining of undue "parallel diplomacy" spearheaded by rival factions, has prided itself for pushing Iran's nuclear program forward, defending Iran's nuclear rights, and pursuing a "smart diplomacy" that has brought the US-led drive for further sanctions against Iran to a halt, albeit temporary, in light of the "5 plus 1" countries' decision to give more time to the current Iran-IAEA negotiations to work; regarding the latter, a new round of Iran-IAEA discussions are due in Tehran this week.
Most Iran watchers agree that Ahmadinejad's presidency will rise or fall on the outcome of the present nuclear crisis. Iran's economy is being impacted by the increased sanctions and the latest reports regarding the negative impact on Iran's trade with the European countries bespeak of a major foreign policy crisis that needs to be brought to an end, somehow, sooner rather than later.
But, then again, in evaluating Ahmadinejad's presidency, we must bear in mind that (a) he inherited the nuclear crisis, and (b) his management of the nuclear file has shown signs of deft diplomacy and progress. A major problem here, however, has to do with "parallel diplomacy", multi-source nuclear decision-making, and the need for nuclear centralization.
Parallel diplomacy, however, has its own values and should not be rejected out of hand by Ahmadinejad and his administration. It can, for instance, weaken the resolve of Iran's opponents and help ingratiate them toward Iran when, in its absence, a completely unified and homogenous policy may not be able to.
Yet that may be wishful thinking, notwithstanding Iran's factional politics, upcoming presidential elections two years from now, and the national security threats posed to Iran which are eliciting different recipes for action by different power centers inside Iran.
Contrary to a spate of recent commentaries on Ahmadinejad, it is sheer error to label him as "powerless" and at the complete beckoning of other, more powerful, sources of power. In a theocratic republic with an evolving presidency, Ahmadinejad has managed to increase his voice and input on nuclear policy and other important realms of domestic and foreign policy (for more on this see the author's Ahmadinejad's bureaucratic revolution), and has done so both as a result of his foreign policy team's achievements cited above and also due to other areas of success, eg, Iran's new strategic relations with Latin America, as part and parcel of a new globalist foreign policy that transcends Iran's immediate region and continent and seeks to forge a global alliance along Third World lines. It comes as no surprise then that Ahmadinejad flew from New York to Bolivia and Venezuela, where he was greeted as a champion of the world's have-nots and was able to sign major agreements with both Latin nations.
Indeed, Iran's Third World politics have solidified Iran's role in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which has fully supported Iran's nuclear rights. This represents one area of clear and unquestionable success by Ahmadinejad's administration. The administration has simultaneously expended considerable energy to enhance Iran's Islamist ties of solidarity, particularly within the OIC (Organization of Islamic Conference); the OIC, like NAM, has provided solid support for Iran's nuclear rights.
Projecting power with principles, championing NAM's cause of a multi-polar world order and the rights of oppressed Palestinians, while maintaining good relations with the new governments in Kabul and Baghdad, as well as with practically all of the other neighboring states and "near-neighbors" in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East, these are among the chief foreign policy pluses cited by Ahmadinejad's supporters. There are, however, several problem areas that paint a somewhat different, less glorious, picture, including the following:
# Iran's policy in the Caspian Sea region has been neglected. In light of the upcoming summit of the leaders of the five Caspian littoral states in Tehran in mid-October, Iran's relative neglect of this facet of the country's foreign policy has begun to receive public attention and the upcoming summit provides an opportunity for Ahmadinejad to quiet his critics by causing a much-needed breakthrough in the stalled, marathon negotiations on the legal status of the Caspian Sea. Russia, which has already parcelled out parts of the Caspian Sea to Kazakhastan and Azerbaijan,(1) must show serious initiative as well, otherwise this summit will turn into another failure, as was the case in the Asghabat summit.(2) But, of course, this summit is Russia's opportunity to prove its friendship with Iran, by committing itself to complete the Bushehr power plant irrespective of the nuclear row.
# Iran-Russia relations need improvement. Indeed, the current setbacks in relations, represent a minus on Ahmadinejad's record, and yet the situation can be reversed with deft diplomacy, due to shared Iranian and Russian apprehensions about the US's interventionist policies, NATO's eastward expansion, and the like.
# Iran's EU policy needs a facelift. Iran cannot realistically afford the present negative trend in its relations with Europe, Iran's main trade partner. Thirty seven percent of Iran's foreign trade is with Europe, and yet almost all the relevant statistics about Iran-EU trade in 2006 reflect a declining trend which, when combined with the new French president's anti-Iran stance, will likely continue barring a breakthrough in the nuclear stalemate. Iranian officials have recently gone on the offensive, reminding the French in particular that their national interests will be harmed if they persist in their Iran bashing. France is the leading lender to Iran, with Iran owing some US$5.8 billion to the French banks, France depends on Iran for oil and gas imports, and Iran has signed major contracts with French firms. According to Tehran, it is unwise for President Nicholas Sarkozy to get on the US bandwagon against Iran since that would harm French economic interests.
In conclusion, the above cursory look at Ahmadinejad's foreign policy is of course not a substitute for an in-depth, critical assessment at the level of country-to-country, regional, and international units of analysis with the help of appropriate methodology and "risk analysis". The compass of such a mid-term report can shed much light on the areas where Ahmadinejad needs to show more energy and imagination, where continuity and or adjustments or even discontinuities are needed, for the remainder of his presidency.
Notes (1) Iran's relations with the republic of Azerbaijan have become tense again, due to the publication of a map in Baku that depicts Iran as part of ancient Azerbaijan. Iranian politicians and press have lashed out at the Azeri government for allowing this to happen, reminding them that Baku was a part of Iran until the Russian-Iranian wars of the early 19th century that led to the peace treaties of Golestan and Turkmenchai, ceding not only Baku but also many other parts of the Caucasus from Iran.
(2) For more on this see the author's Letter from Asghabat: The Caspian quagmire. Also, Afrasiabi, Beyond the conflicting treaties
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
<http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8364066A-2388-4194-BEF0-1A262E6976A9.htm> Ahmadinejad's message to the world By Mark LeVine
It was quite a week for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president.
First he faced down the president of Columbia University and a host of hostile questioners in Harlem.
Then he headed down to Midtown Manhattan, where for 45 minutes he held the world's attention at the United Nations, before heading farther south, to Caracas, Venezuela, for talks with his close ally, President Hugo Chavez.
Local papers, such as the Daily News and The New York Post, featured headlines announcing that "The Evil has Landed" and lambasting the "Mad Iran Prez" for his past denials of the Holocaust, refusal to unequivocally renounce a quest for nuclear weapons, and call to have Israel "wiped off the map" (an inaccurate translation of the Persian "bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad," which is better - but less violently and therefore less usefully - rendered in English as "erased from the page of time" or "fate").
Even Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, introduced him with an unprecedented - and to the minds of many academics, not to mention Iranians, uncouth - verbal attack, accusing him of being little more than a "petty dictator".
In its critiques of Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia, the mainstream US press focused most of its attention on Ahmadinejad's tendentious claim that "there are no homosexuals in Iran" (belied by an evening stroll through Tehran's famous Daneshjoo Park), and his attempt to redefine his position on the Holocaust (it happened, but more research is needed to know its true extent).
At the UN, his criticism of "widespread human rights violations" elicited the expected derisive response in light of his own government's increasingly repressive policies, while his declaration that the nuclear case against Iran "is closed" suggested, to most commentators, continued intransigence by Iran in the face of supposedly universal opposition to its nuclear programme.
Discourteous treatment
Few commentators considered how Ahmadinejad's words were heard outside of the US media circus.
And those who did, such as Timothy Rutton of the LA Times, focused purely on the reaction in the Muslim world, arguing that, as a "totalitarian demagogue", Ahmadinejad gained legitimacy because of the discourteous treatment by Columbia's president.
Rutton wrote: "Bollinger's denunciation was icing on the cake, because the constituency the Iranian leader cares about is scattered across an Islamic world that values hospitality and its courtesies as core social virtues."
"To that audience, Bollinger looked stunningly ill-mannered; Ahmadinejad dignified and restrained."
Underlying Rutton's argument is the still-widespread belief, whose roots lie deep in Europe and America's histories as imperial powers, that Muslims and the other formerly colonised peoples value "honour", "pride" and "hospitality" far more than they do issues of substance.
Indeed, they remain incapable of making well-reasoned and documented criticisms of a West, and the United States in particular, that remains by definition technologically, politically, and morally superior to the developing world.
'Poverty and deprivation'
It's no wonder, then, that almost no one in the American media focused on the substantive claims of Ahmadinejad's speech at the UN.
Chief among them were his argument regarding the "alarming situation of poverty and deprivation".
"Let me draw your attention to some data issued by the United Nations," he said, before calling to the attention of the world's leaders the fact that close to one billion people live on less than $1-a-day and that there is a rapidly increasing gap between the world's rich and poor.
He mentioned the continued disgraceful figures for infant mortality, schooling and related human development indicators in the developing world.
Perhaps wanting to be courteous, Ahmadinejad blamed "certain big powers" for the plight of a large share of humanity - he might have added that according to UN estimates almost half the world lives on less than $2 per day.
But he didn't need to name names; most of the developing world, including the Muslim world, share his belief that their plight is linked to a world economic system whose goal, for more than half a millennium, has been to exploit the peoples and resources of the rest of the world for the benefit of the more advanced countries of the West.
That is precisely why so many people in the developing world remain opposed to Western-sponsored globalisation, which for most critics, including in the Arab/Muslim world, is little more than imperialism dressed up in the rhetoric of "free markets" and "liberal democracy".
It is this much wider audience, from the favelas of Rio De Janeiro and the shanty towns of Lagos as much as the slums of Casablanca, Sadr City or Cairo, to whom Ahmadinejad was speaking.
His discourse was strikingly similar to that of his biggest ally, Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, who in his speech before the assembly last year had fewer qualms (perhaps because he's neither Arab nor Muslim) about pointing fingers at whom he considers responsible for the sorry shape of so much of the world.
Hoisting Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival above his head, he exclaimed that "the hegemonic pretensions of US imperialism ... put at risk the very survival of humankind".
America, not Iran, Chavez argued, is "the greatest threat looming over our planet".
The Ahmadinejad-Chavez axis has been compared by American politicians such as Florida Republican Congressman Connie Mack to the relationship between Fidel Castro and Russia.
Such analogies are far off the mark.
A more accurate historical comparison would be to the relationship between Egypt's Gemal Abdel Nasser to India's Jawal Nehru, when both came together at the Bandung conference in 1955 to attempt to build a coherent bloc of nations that could protect its interests against those of the two major superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union.
'Human underdogs'
Writing after attending the Bandung Conference, the American novelist Richard Wright exclaimed that it was a meeting of "the despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed - in short, the underdogs of the human race".
It was this shared experience of oppression that grounded the "Bandung Spirit", which leaders such as Nasser used to develop the "pan-" ideologies (-Arab, -African, -American, -Islamic) that proved a thorn in the side of US policymakers for much of the Cold war.
The difference between Chavez and Ahmadinejad and their "Third World" predecessors, is, in a word, oil.
Iran and Venezuela possess the third- and seventh-largest oil reserves in the world, totaling well over 200 billion barrels - that's not much less than the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia.
The two countries will earn well over $80bn in revenues this year alone.
As important, both countries possess non-oil sectors that are surprisingly robust, according to many estimates, for the majority of both Iran's and Venezuela's Gross Domestic Product.
This provides both countries with billions of dollars to spend on foreign aid, as demonstrated by Ahmadinejad's stopover in Bolivia, where he pledged $1bn in Iranian aid and development to the poverty stricken country.
US policymakers' view of the world through the "you're either with us or against us" prism divides the globe into those who support the US and Europe (and the "West" more broadly), and those who support al-Qaeda and "Islamofascism", a term which has been created precisely to ensure that Americans conflate Osama bin Laden with Ahmadinejad, and both with Hitler.
But few people outside of the West buy this comparison, or the larger black-and-white world-view it reflects.
Instead, in Africa and Latin America, Ahmadenijad's argument that "humanity has had a deep wound on its tired body caused by impious powers for centuries" resonates far more deeply than George Bush's hollow-sounding calls for democracy and "ending tyranny".
Colonial rule
The West advises Africa to "get over" colonialism, but the pain of colonial rule is still felt by those suffering under the policies imposed by the IMF and/or the World Bank, or from the continued subsidisation of American and European agribusiness while their countries are flooded with below-market wheat, soy or corn.
It is to those people whom Ahmadinejad promised - in language that strikingly mirrors US President Bush's often religiously-hued speeches - that "the era of darkness will end" with the "dawn of the liberation of, and freedom for, all humans".
Americans may not like Ahmadinejad's or Chavez's internal politics, ideological orientations, or foreign policies.
But for most of the third world, which is tired of centuries of domination by the West, the two leaders are a breath of fresh air, who are coming not as conquerors, but as comrades.
They are free of the condescending "civilising mission" that, from Napoleon's invasion of Egypt to the US invasion of Iraq, always seem to include war, occupation, and the appropriation of strategic natural resources under foreign control as part of their mandate.
And because of this, most of the citizens of the developing world, rightly or wrongly, couldn't care less about Ahmadinejad's positions on Israel, the Holocaust, and nuclear weapons, never mind homosexuals, none of which affect them directly.
They care only that he is sticking-it-to their old colonial or Cold war masters, and offering "respect", "friendship" and billions of dollars in aid with no strings attached.
Americans, Europeans and Israelis can fret about it all they want, but it will not change this reality.
Only a reorientation of the world economy towards real sustainability and equality will dampen his appeal, and that's not likely to happen soon.
Which means that Americans will be hearing a lot more of Ahmadinejad and leaders like him in the future.
The question is, will they be listening?
Mark LeVine is professor of modern Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine in California, US, and author and editor of half-a-dozen books, including Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil (Oneworld, 2005) and the forthcoming Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Religion and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (Random House/Verso) and An Impossible Peace: Oslo and the Burdens of History (Zed Books). He is a regular commentator on Al Jazeera's The Listening Post. www.culturejamming.org
-- Yoshie