Ahmadinejad’s Flare Amps Up Tensions

PARIS - A serious difficulty for those in the United States and Israel intent on eliminating Iran as an important Middle Eastern power center and political actor is that Iran presents a moving target. Yesterday it seemed moving toward democracy. Tomorrow it may seem the same. Today it has Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as its president.

The problem is that people tend to think that presidents in Iran have the power Congress has conceded to American presidents. They don't. Nonetheless, the arrival in the presidential office of the demagogic populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former Tehran mayor, has been an enormous boost to those in the White House who think that the United States and Israel should attack Iran.

Before Ahmadinejad, the only justification available was that the Iranians seemed in pursuit of a nuclear military deterrent to foreign attack, concealing it within their legal, U.N.-inspected, civilian nuclear-power development program.

Washington's alarmed view of this found only limited echo among the Europeans and major Asian powers, and Mohamed ElBaradei of the U.N. atomic agency insisted on continued negotiations to find a compromise on inspections.

Then came the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2005, promising poverty reform and social justice, and with a flair for drama and demagogic statement. This kept him popular among ordinary Iranians during his first 18 months in office.

His international travels combined with his challenge to the existence of the Holocaust to give him international notoriety. On the latter, he demanded to know why, if the Holocaust had indeed taken place, as everyone including the Germans told him it had, the Palestinians had been the ones punished for it, by having their lands taken away from them.

Meanwhile, his well-publicized nuclear defiance accomplished what American and Israeli officialdom had previously failed to do: convince the U.N. Security Council's members to impose sanctions on Iran until it conformed to the nuclear transparency demands made by the international community. These took effect in December.

The U.N. nuclear agency in Vienna had lost patience with Iranian evasions and equivocations, as had the European Union governments attempting to negotiate an arrangement with Teheran that would satisfy the international community.

Ahmadinejad's second negative accomplishment was to prepare the way for George W. Bush's strategy speech at the beginning of January with its condemnation of Iranian activities inside Iraq in supposed support for Shiite insurgents, and for its sponsorship of Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon and Gaza.

The Bush speech also contained what was interpreted as a threat to attack Iran, reinforced by the president's dispatch of a second carrier task force to the Gulf region, together with defensive missile systems to "protect America's allies." Protect them from what?

U.S. bloggers quickly replied: from retaliation for an American or American-Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear research sites (attacks that the frequently, but not always, well-informed London Sunday Times forecast would employ nuclear penetration bombs). A Chinese news agency added the detail that the attack would happen before April, since that would be Tony Blair's last month in office. All this was, of course, officially denied. However, international opinion is now half-convinced that the attack on Iran is coming.

Critics inside Iran of President Ahmadinejad, reformers and hard-liners alike, accuse the president of having done more harm than good for Iran with his intransigence on nuclear matters and defiance of the Security Council. They fear more severe U.N. sanctions, as well as attack.

They accuse him of budget mismanagement and overambitious spending plans at a time when Iran's oil income and budget reserves have dropped. His critics include former president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who was once looked upon in the West as the bright star of liberalization in Iran.

The popularity of Ahmadinejad's government has dropped. Western analysts say the government's own polls show more than 70 percent of those questioned in favor of political change. The same percentage is said to want greater democracy.

In fact, as democracy goes in most of the world, Iran already is relatively democratic. Call it a theocratic democracy, since the results of popular elections are subject to final endorsement by senior clerical figures. The liberalization of social standards and practices has gone much further than in Saudi Arabia, for example. There is much international travel and interaction with the outside world.

Iranian families frequently have international connections and professional links, and study abroad.

What makes trouble is that it wants what India and Pakistan now have: a nuclear deterrent against foreign attack.

The other reason it is a pariah is Ahmadinejad's stand on Israel.

He seems to be a pious believer in the imminent coming of the missing "Twelfth Imam," a messiah-like figure in the belief of radical Shiites. He concluded his Security Council speech last year with a prayer that God would speed the Imam's long-awaited return, when a golden age is expected to begin. There are supporters of George Bush with similar apocalyptic expectations, in their case the golden age to be preceded by a great war.