The Tharwa Commentary

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: More than missiles and manoeuvres

Meir Javedanfar
www.meepas.com

Mishavad va mitavanim. It is possible and we can do it, was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election slogan. It had a positive ring to it. Many of his young supporters liked it, because it sounded optimistic. A ‘can do' attitude was what many were looking for, because Iranians were tired of geriatric Ayatollahs who were much better at creating problems than solving them.

The recent maneuvers in Iran bear the hallmarks of not just Iran's defensive doctrine, but also Ahmadinejad's personality. Ahmadinejad considers himself as very calm and confident. When presented with a challenge or a problem, he doesn't just bark back. He prefers to present his answer in a very cool and controlled manner. This has been visible during many of his interviews. The famous Mike Wallace interview is a prime example. Even though it was Wallace who was presenting the tough and sometimes provocative questions, it was him who got flustered and lost his cool, not Ahmadinejad. 

One the surface, Iran's recent maneuvers are Ahmadinejad's cool and calculated reply to the Americans, and the Persian Gulf countries who took part in another maneuver, a few days before, not far from Iran's shores.

Ahmadi-Nejad's economic operation: Shock and Awe

Professor William O. Beeman, Director of Middle East Studies at brown University comments on the recent move, considered shocking by many observers of Iranian politics, by President Ahmadinejad to transfer supervision of Management and Planning Organization's (MPO) provincial branches to provincial governments, which run under the ministry of Internal Affairs. This move has prompted several well-known deputies to submit their resignation and is considered as a major shake-up of the internal scene in Iran.

I have been waiting for the President to do something like this for some time, and am only surprised that it has taken so long.

Mr. Ahmadinejad ran on an economic reform platform and he has been under
pressure to make good on his promises. This is one of the very few areas in which he has real power, and it was all the more important for him to exercise it.

Along with economic reform goes reform of corruption. The bloated, central agencies handling millions were rife with corruption that was obvious to the common person. Decentralization was the solution, and this move takes the power out of these central bureaucrats. What it also does is to undercut the central authorities with whom Ahmadinejad has been fighting since the beginning of his presidency. They are going to howl bloody murder, but will have little recourse. President Ahmadinejad has one stunning, shining personal quality--he is incorruptible in the eyes of the public. His modest personal lifestyle verges on Sufi values, and is greatly admired. His moves to turn over the tables of the money changers in the temple (mosque) are supremely credible, and will likely inspire others.

The Aesthetic Element in Suicide Bombing

I think one of the keys for understanding suicide bombers must be aesthetic. Suicide bombers believe they are “cool” and their actions are “cool.”  Would-be suicides also believe the bombers are “cool,” their actions are “cool,” and they want to follow them.  Of course, suicide bombers, would-be suicides, and their friends have to, or rather, are forced to believe they are “cool.”

I have analyzed a lot of video taped wills of istishhadis in Iraq and Saudi Arabia for years, in which I could not find tragic resolutions or strong ideologies.  In these video, they criticize the US or Shiite government in a very harsh way, but the last scene is almost always same. They are striking an exaggerated pose, smiling with their bombs or AK-47s or cars loaded with bombs.

They believe they have to protect their moral values, Islamic causes (as they believe), or their countries.  These values are much bigger than they are. They are going to die for great causes or their loving ones.  That is why they are worth being admired.  I personally do not value this kind of aesthetic, but I understand it plays an important role in some societies. We can call them as Machismo, Ninkyo-do (in Japanese), Futuwa, Muruwa, or Sa'alik (in Arabic).

The Jagged Crescent of Islam

Excerpts from the introduction of the forthcoming book "The Jagged Crescent of Islam" by Anwer Sher, reproduced with permission of the author.

I would argue that if the 1990 invasion of Kuwait had not happened and the subsequent direct involvement of the US in the region would not have been so pronounced, the eventual conflict between fundamentalist militant organizations and Middle Eastern regimes would have occurred in any case.

All that the American presence has done was to give such movements an impetus and a rallying call that was previously solely directed at Israel. It is, however, unlikely that the broad-based sympathy of the youth that exists for such movements would have been so obvious. Indeed one can also see that such youths have two driving thoughts: a hatred for the likes of Saddam Hussein and other dictatorial rulers in the region, and a hatred for the American presence. It is this difficult combination to deal with that makes them a continuing and extremely potent threat to American policy in the region.

Iraqi Death Toll

Erik K. Gustafson
Education for Peace in Iraq Center

As much as I'd like to wish that so many excess deaths have not occurred, I have spent the past few days reviewing the methodology and talking with biostatistics and epidemiologists, and with only minor technical problems which the report published on the Lancet website addresses, the survey checks out.

Thus, the following statement was released today: "As an organization that has tracked mortality rates in Iraq since 1998, the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC) believes this latest Iraq mortality survey is the most reliable estimate of excess deaths in Iraq to date."

To help other skeptics and non-epidemiologists like me understand the proven methodology and accuracy of the survey, the following report by AlertNet (reproduced here under the Fair Use Act) is the best commentary that I have seen so far.   

Impact of N. Korea test on negotiations with Iran

What sort of impact will the North Korean nuclear test(s) have on ongoing international’s community’s negotiations with Iran? Will it imbue the talks with a new layer of urgency and get all sides to indulge more seriously in them? Or will it throw a wrench in them and lead to hardening of positions on all sides? Below are two experts’ views on this important issue.

No doubt that the North Korean nuclear test was a serious set back for the advocates of diplomatic negotiations. 

Reza Taghizadeh
University of Glasgow 

Iran is following the N. Korea script of "talk-talk", "nuke-nuke" – dragging out phony negotiations and dropping hints on occasion about potential compromises in order to buy time. 

Gerald Steinberg
Bar Ilan University

Few personal notes on the making of suicide bombers

Ammar Abdulhamid
Tharwa Project Coordinator

Much has been written and said about the phenomenon of suicide bombing recently, and though only recently launched, the Tharwa Commentary could not but address the issue. For this reason, I thought, it might be useful to share the following thoughts with a wider readership in order to shed some lights on this important phenomenon, which I primarily view as being quite psychological in nature.

Indeed, spoken as a former Muslim extremist, I think I can probably contribute a few personal insights into the making of the would-be suicide bomber– the fate that I was lucky enough to elude. 

The disaffected, the maladjusted, the alienated, the outcasts, the neglected, the oppressed, the maltreated and the marginalized, who come from a certain community, will always find ways and means derived from the basic traditions of their community to express and vent their frustration. People always feel the need to justify and legitimate their actions to others, especially when their actions come to disrupt certain accepted norms, or fly in the face of accepted values. It’s no surprising that the first thing they would do in this case is to look for whatever precedent, quotes or duly forgotten and neglected aspect of the common faith and traditions and use that to justify their actions.

Islamo-Fascism IV: The Twentieth Century dictatorships and Islamism

In cooperation with MidEastWeb

In the twentieth century, the world was plagued with several totalitarian dictatorships. As we saw previously, the formal ideological rationales for these dictatorships differed, and, in the case of the USSR, the regime as implemented had little relation to the ideological design. Nonetheless, in practice, all the regimes looked very much alike - They all shared characteristics of repression, belief in undemocratic rule, subjugation of the interests of the individual to that of the collective, curtailing of civil rights, "thought control" and "mass ideology." There was a "right way" to think and a "wrong way" to think, and those who thought the "wrong way" were doomed, pariahs. They were labeled enemies of the state, reactionaries, left-deviationists, un-German, anti-Soviet, anti-Fascisti. They were beaten with truncheons or shipped off to Gulags or concentration camps. The dictatorships were not confined to the first half of the twentieth century. As the world is beginning to understand, Maoist China was fully as bad or worse than anything seen in the days of Stalin: tens of millions of people were murdered. The deposed right-wing Argentine dictatorship shared many of these characteristics on a lesser scale.

Islamo-Fascism III: How to measure Fascism

In cooperation with MidEastWeb

Previously, we saw that no two experts seem to agree on the precise definition of fascism. The only formal definition of fascism, by a fascist, is the encyclopedia article by Mussolini (actually co-written or ghost written by Giovanni Gentile), The Doctrine of Fascism. As we noted, a 1921 note appended to that article shows that Mussolini had first coined the term, gathered a movement, and then set about formulating a philosophy that would justify whatever he was going to do. Reading Mussolini's article, and likewise a subsequent article he wrote, "In Germany: Fascism" we find his "philosophy" of fascism is a lot of repetitive, bombastic and sometimes contradictory bumf. The only clear ideas that seem to emerge are that the individual is subordinate to the state, that spiritual "idealism," consisting of action, struggle and death cult, are superior to "materialism."

Religion, Suicide and Martyrdom in Armed Conflict

David E. Long

Politically motivated suicide is as old as history. Consider, for example, the case Samson, mentioned in the Judeo-Christian holy Book of Judges. He literally brought down the house, killing himself and his political enemies. Of late, there has been a whole spate of new articles and monographs addressing modern Islamic suicide terrorism, for the most part blaming it tacitly if not explicitly on the religious doctrine and teachings of Islam.

If there is one thing these works have illuminated, it is that the phenomenon of politically motivated suicide is far more complicated than the authors of the more anecdotal, polemical, and pseudo-social science literature on Islamic suicidal terrorism seem willing to concede.