Ahmadinejad, Israel, and mass killings
Feb 20th, 2008 by MESH
From Stephen Peter Rosen
I am worried. Last year I did some historical research on the shifts in discourse within British, Japanese, and South African official elites prior to their use of biological weapons. In all these cases, including the deliberate distribution of small pox-infected blankets by the British in North America, the use of bubonic plague by the Japanese in China, and the use of anthrax by the South Africans in what was then Rhodesia, use of biological agents was preceded by an escalation of rhetorical campaigns to demonize and dehumanize the targeted enemy.
The problem in using these shifts in discourse as an early warning indicator, is, of course, one of calibration and of over-prediction. Many references to enemies as less than human are not associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings. Some streams of discourse are chronically laden with dehumanizing rhetoric. Detecting meaningful shifts requires close study of the discourse of interest over time, and I have not done this with regard to Iran and Israel. Casual observation suggests that references to Israel as a “cancer” are old, but that the reference to Israel as a “black and dirty microbe” is new.
On the basis of my historical research, my recommendation was that a significant shift in discourse of this character be used as a indicator that we should focus intelligence collection assets on a target that is now suspected of being willing to engage in mass killing by unconventional means, and to issue specific deterrent threats of retaliation. I do not know if either of these measures has been adopted by the government of Israel, or the United States, but it would seem prudent for them to do so.
I invite comment from those who systematically track Iranian discourse, to reassure me that there is nothing to worry about, or to verify my concerns.
5 Responses to “Ahmadinejad, Israel, and mass killings”
My short answer is that Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy. Iranians as a group are generally anything but genocidal or homicidal though, and find their president an acute embarrassment. But the very strident rhetoric against them has backed them into a corner.
In talking to various friends in Iran, and the Iranian media, my sense is that society is divided between the official line and a generally pro-Western, liberal attitude that gets little attention and enjoys very little political clout. Unfortunately Khatami’s overtures to the United States were not answered, and this further isolated Iranian reformists.
Seymour Hersh thinks Israel sent a message to Iran by bombing the site in Syria. Now we have to see what Hezbollah does after the assassination of Imad Mughniyah. If they fire katyushas at Haifa then I think Israel will have U.S. support in a strong response that involves naming and punishing Iranian state complicity. The problem is, it’s a Pandora’s box. A direct attack on Iran would be catastrophic, I think.
James R. Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard.
I agree with Stephen Peter Rosen that we have to research the shift in discourse of Iranian leaders about Israel. But giving too much credit to Ahmadinejad’s speeches does not seem to be realistic. Ahmadinejad does not represent the Iranian government. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is the one who deserves to be focused upon, and I do not see any discourse shift in his speeches. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian military and security bodies are under the direct supervision of the Supreme Leader, not Ahmadinejad.
Ahmadinejad is losing his social power base as well as his political power base within the regime itself. Much evidence indicates that Khamenei is trying to bypass Ahmadinejad and assert his authority on a variety of issues.
Mehdi Khalaji is a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author, most recently, of Apocalyptic Politics: On the Rationality of Iranian Policy.
Ahmadinejad is a man who prides himself on being a straight talker. When he calls Israel a “dirty microbe,” he means it. And we have to believe him.
But we also have to understand the fact that name calling is all he can do. Despite his tough words, Ahmadinejad has very little say over Iran’s defense policies. Even if Iran gets its hands on a nuclear bomb, it will not be Ahmadinejad who will be in charge of the all-important launch button. That job will belong to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
Unlike Ahmadinejad, he is not a messianic. Furthermore, he is not suicidal. He was there when Ayatollah Khomeini took the decision of agreeing to a ceasefire with Iraq in 1988, because Khomeini was told by his commanders that if he carried on fighting, his regime would collapse. Khamenei is very well aware of Israel’s capabilities, and it is extremely unlikely that he would risk losing life and power because of the beliefs of one of his soldiers, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Unfortunately for Iran, what Ahmadinejad doesn’t seem to realize is that these statements are self-defeating. When Ahmadinejad makes such statements, in the long run, the number of countries willing to justify Iran’s right to a civilian nuclear program, and to trust Tehran with it, dwindles.
Meanwhile, the international community must take a decisive stance against the use of such terms by Ahmadinejad. He would be well advised to focus on eliminating the germ of poverty, unemployment and corruption at home. After all, this is why his supporters elected him president.
Meir Javedanfar is the co-author of The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran. He also heads the Middle East Economic and Political Analysis Company (MEEPAS).
Stephen Rosen asks an important question about the escalation in rhetoric by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I do not follow Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric closely, or at least any closer than most people who try to stay current with international news. However, from what I know of the processes of intelligence, I do not think the United States will devote any more resources to evaluating his rhetoric as an indicator of Iran’s intentions, though I have no idea whether Israel would.
There are at least two major reasons why this is so. First, intelligence analysts have historically shied away from evaluating intentions of leaders, frequently because intentions can change rapidly. In place of analyzing intentions, analysts prefer to focus on capabilities; that is, the resources a state could bring to bear in the event of a war, or crisis, and the like. Bureaucratically, such analysts also stand to lose less influence when they are wrong on questions of capabilities, but stand to lose quite a lot when wrong on intentions. Cynically, I would add that this leads analysts to avoid taking clear positions and putting their reputations on the line for what they think and believe.
Second, the dynamics of leadership analysis for intelligence are different with different nations. When a Hitler or a Stalin is in power, it is easier to look for leads in their rhetoric for their intentions, since they hold enough power to bring about what they desire to achieve. However, Iran is much more complicated, and the power structure within Iran is more divided: Ahmadinejad may not be the most important broker of power within the Iranian leadership.
But I think Stephen Rosen is right. If analyses such as his yield useful predictors of leaders’ intentions, it would be prudent for our intelligence agencies to pay attention to shifts in rhetoric. I am especially interested in his historical case studies that demonstrate a shift in rhetoric before the use of unconventional weapons in war. I am, unfortunately, not sanguine that our intelligence agencies will detect that shift on their own.
Mark T. Clark is a member of MESH.
I, too, agree with Stephen Rosen that Ahmadinejad’s recent words reducing Israel and its people to the status of a disease should serve as a wake-up call, but I don’t see this as representing a particularly noteworthy rhetorical escalation. Iranian leaders and Islamists in general have been speaking this way about Israel for a long time: Khomeini himself was particularly volatile and vulgar on the subject, and many of the “reformists” who still claim to follow his “line” are not so easily outdone in this area themselves. The wake-up call, in other words, has been shouted from the rooftops for a long time now, but if the specific usage of “microbes” does the trick—as opposed to “devils,” “pigs,” “a cancer,” “murderers,” “pharaohs,” “baby butchers,” “perpetrators of genocide,” “killers of the prophets,” “enemies of God,” etc.—then so be it.
The premier difference between previous governments and the present one in this connection is not one of intent or aspiration, but one of perceived ability to prevail. A variety of regional developments have contributed to the genuinely held outlook among members of Ahmadinejad’s administration, and in the mind of the President himself, that Israel has deteriorated from a potent nemesis to a Potemkin village, to a “hollow tree” that the “combined breath of the world’s fasting Muslims [during Ramadan] can easily topple.”
Few motifs have been as ubiquitous in the media of the Islamic Republic over the last several years than what is described as the implosion of the “Zionist entity”: every ill plaguing Israeli society, from drugs and violence in the schools to difficulty in absorbing Russian immigrants to (believe it or not) the decline in Sabbath observance is reported with relish as an indication of the increasing demoralization of the eternal foe. If Iranian words lead to Iranian actions in the near future where they did not do so in the past, this is not so much a function of a shift in terminology as it is a result of the expanding belief among Iranian leaders that they can threaten Israel and chip away at its security with relative impunity. This perception must be changed by transforming the reality that led to it—that is, by restoring to full throttle Israel’s deterrent power. This, in turn, will bring about a softening of the rhetoric, which is a reflection of the reality and not vice versa.
While I agree with Mehdi Khalaji that Khamenei can sometimes serve as a counterweight to Ahmadinejad, the rhetoric of the Supreme Leader on the subject of Israel (and America) is hardly less fierce than that of the chief executive: the Supreme Leader has quite the mouth on him when the mood strikes. As for the remainder of the government and populace, I believe that we should stop deluding ourselves that one has to be a doctrinaire Islamist ideologue in order to see the annihilation of Israel as a desideratum. Most Iranians have imbibed cum lacte, and throughout their lives, the notion—the “absolute truth”—that Zionism is a (is the) source of profound evil, and although for many this idea was long ago reduced to a mere mantra, a meaningless slogan, it should never be forgotten that such mantras and slogans, when they cloy in the conscious mind, burrow ever deeper into the recesses of the psyche, and are installed down underneath the level of meaning, in the place where basic instincts, automatic assumptions and ontological verities reside. When the time is ripe—and it will be soon—the decades of propaganda pounded into the brains of Iranians and other Muslims will be reactivated in order to create an atmosphere conducive to the eradication of an entire population.
Here in Tel Aviv, we haven’t slept well for a while now.
Ze’ev Maghen is professor of Persian language and Islamic history and chair of the department of Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.