Post #250 - More Truth and Falsehood

Iran and the West

Quick Quiz

(answers below)

1. Which countries have utilized torture to gather intelligence:

A. Israel

B. United States

C. Iran

D. Iraq

E. Afghanistan

F. All of the above

2. The person who said, "Israel must be wiped from the face of the earth" was:

A. Ayatollah Khomeini

B. Ali Rafsanjani

C. Ayatollah Khamenei

D. Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad

E. None of the above

3. The first place where demonstrations were held bemoaning the 9/11 attacks was:

A. New York City

B. Tehran

C. London

D. Berlin

E. None of the above

4. Countries which have inspections under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty include:

A. United States

B. Pakistan

C. Israel

D. Iran

E. India

F. All of the above

5. During the past forty years, which country/countries have faced a true existential threat?

A. Israel and the United States

B. Kuwait and Iran

C. Kurdistan and Palestine

D. Egypt and Syria

E. All of the above

6. The country from which Iran first sourced nuclear technologies:

A. Pakistan

B. Russian Federation

C. United States

D. North Korea

E. None of the above

7. Saddam Hussein made the most extensive use of chemical weapons against:

A. The Kurdish

B. Sunni Muslim Arabs

C. Shi'ite Muslim non-Arabs

D. The Turks

E. None of the above

8. The country that gave the most support to the Taliban in their fight against the Soviets:

A. Pakistan

B. United States

C. Iran

D. Saudi Arabia

E. None of the above

9. The largest number of suicide bombers has been of which nationality?:

A. Sri Lankan

B. Saudi

C. Palestinian

D. Iranian

E. Afghan

10. The United States has military stationed in which country adjacent to Iran?

A. Afghanistan

B. Iraq

C. Turkmenistan

D. Pakistan

E. Turkey

F. All of the above

11. Which nation has invaded a country in the Middle East in the past century?

A. Iraq

B. United States

C. Israel

D. Turkey

E. All of the above

12. Match the countries and the estimated number of nuclear warheads held by each:

A. North Korea 1. 240

B. Iran 2. 0

C. Israel 3. 70-90

D. United States 4. 5 - 15

E. Pakistan 5. 1790

F. China 6. 200

Iran and the West

Quiz Questions

First, let me say that in selecting the questions, I tried to feature information of which most Americans are not aware. I realize that the points I've made are not balanced. They are intended to start a conversation among all of you.

1. Which countries have utilized torture to gather intelligence:

A. Israel

B. United States

C. Iran

D. Iraq

E. All of the above

Unfortunately, the answer is E.

I am on the board of the National Religious Campaign against Torture. This issue is one that threatens to obscure the line between responsible and compassionate governance of which we are supposed to be an exemplar, and the "rogue regimes" that we condemn. I hope we can work harder to stay on the right side of that line.

A question that must be asked is: who is responsible for these decisions? In our country, it was mainly President Bush and Vice President Cheney, aided by their legal advisors who made the case for permissibility. Congress could have passed legislation to stop such practices, but chose not to. The people could have stopped it, but elected to leave such decisions to our leaders.  We are all complicit.

In Iran, it is harder for us to know who calls the shots. The president is in charge of the government, but he clearly is reined in sometimes by the Supreme Leader, who is, in a real sense "commander-in-chief." The parliament is acting more and more independent of late, even recently summoning the president to testify (something that almost never happens here). The Supreme Leader himself, in turn, can be dismissed by the Assembly of Experts that appointed him. The Assembly, by the way, is elected by the people, but only from those candidates who have been approved by the Supreme Leader. Assessing accountability in Iran is really not a snap. To some extent, though, this is deliberate. "Constructive ambiguity" is the phrase sometimes used to describe the "keep 'em off-guard" approach to both domestic and foreign adversaries.

2. The person who said, "Israel must be wiped from the face of the earth" was:

A. Ayatollah Khomeini

B. Ali Rafsanjani

C. Ayatollah Khamenei

D. Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad

E. None of the above

Almost qualifies as a trick question, but the answer is E.

Let me be clear on two points: I think that questioning the historicity of the Holocaust is an abomination -- Ahmadinezhad is clearly guilty of that; and we must work out a solution to the Middle East situation that assures the possibility of Jews having a homeland where they can feel safe. However: truth does matter.

The press, politicians and pundits are quite fond of saying “President Ahmadinezhad called for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth.” With slight variations, this has been repeated over and over again, so that virtually everyone in the West believes that the Iranian politician did, in fact, say that. There is one problem, though: he didn't actually say it. Not only did he not say it, but many of those who repeat the quote to such effect know that he didn't say it. It took months for the major news outlets to get their act together on it, and some still haven't issued retractions.

Here is the Persian: امام عزيز ما فرمودند كه اين رژيم اشغالگر قدس بايد از صفحه روزگار محو شود (transliterated: “Imam-e-aziz-e maa farmoudand keh een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad as safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.”) A more faithful rendering into English of what he said on the occasion in question would be: “Our dear Imam [Khomeini] offered that the regime occupying Jerusalem should pass from the pages of history.” I would say that "regime change" is a more reasonable take-away than genocide.

3. The first place where demonstrations were held bemoaning the 9/11 attacks was:

A. New York City

B. Tehran

C. London

D. Berlin

E. None of the above

Yes, it was Tehran. Which actually shouldn't surprise us. Every poll and every anecdotal report from some of the 500 or so Americans who have been to Iran over the past few years, and my own experience, all show that Iranians -- even now -- continue to have friendly feelings and admiration for the American people. Somehow, they manage to make a distinction between us, the people, and the policies of our government under several presidents from 1979 to the present. Do we make the same kind of distinction -- or do we tend to demonize "those people" -- whether they are Russian, Vietnamese or Iranian?

There are now about 600,000 blogs in Persian on the internet -- incredible! The problem? Almost no one in this country reads Persian. Even our State Department has virtually no real Iran experts; its expertise has degraded every year since 1980, when we ceased having diplomatic relations.

Fouad Ajami, a professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said:

“Iran was America's 'laboratory' in the region... But societies have mysteries of their own; we hadn't really known our Persian friends....At its core, this was a Persian drama, the pain of a society of pride and hurt, the attempt of a people of high learning long in the crosswinds of mightier powers – Russia, Britain, America – to find their footing in the world... Into this Persian struggle, there wandered Jimmy Carter... Carter had promised a moral foreign policy. In his inaugural address, he had proclaimed his commitment to the cause of human rights. Iran emerged as the brutal test case of this moralism. As a revolution of many discontents gathered fury, the Carter administration appeared uncertain of its aims. Human rights pulled in one direction, strategic necessity the opposite way. It was even hard for American officials to divine the depth of Iran's crisis. [The CIA reported] to Carter, as late as August 1978, that Iran was “not in a revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary situation." (I was in Iran then, and I could have told them they were wrong, but no one asked me.)

4. Countries which have inspections under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty include:

A. United States

B. Pakistan

C. Israel

D. Iran

E. India

F. All of the above

E - Iran. The US is a "have" nation under the NPT and thus not required to have inspections. The others are not parties to the treaty at all. As recently as this month, Ayatollah Khamenei reiterated that they do not have a bomb, haven't wanted to get one, and do not intend to do so in the future. Furthermore, an official Islamic fatwa has been issued saying that it would be "un-Islamic." Do I think they are making plans to make a bomb -- just in case? Yes. But who wouldn't, as threatened as they are?

Ray Takeyh wrote, "From Tehran's perspective, the prospect of a radical Sunni regime coming to power in Pakistan with its finger on the nuclear button is nearly an existential threat." Dr. Yitzhak Ravid, former head of military studies at the Israeli Armament Devt. Authority, said, “exaggerated analyses of the Iranian threat capability played straight into Tehran's hands, and aided Iran's attempt to frighten Israelis.” Ravid said: "...the Iranian regime was struggling to produce a first generation-type nuclear bomb..." He argued that the Iranians faced a major challenge in attempting to fit such a bomb onto a missile that could carry the weight of a nuclear warhead to Israel. The analyst noted that an image of an Iranian 'missile' test, widely circulated around the Israeli media, were actually images of rockets, not missiles. "'Never in human history has more than one Shihab missile been successfully test fired," Ravid said. "And the Shihabs themselves are very limited. They are actually a scud-sized missile." Uzi Rubin, head of ballistic missile research for the Ministry of Defense said: "The Iranians are almost frantic in volunteering information about their weapons capabilities, sometimes to the point of incredibility… they mean to impress..." Dr. Martin van Creveld is an Israeli military strategist and professor of military history. In an interview in 2007, van Crefeld said: "We Israelis have what it takes to deter an Iranian attack. And I think we are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us. We cannot say so too openly, however, because we have a history of using any threat in order to get weapons. And it works beautifully: Thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from U.S. and Germany."

5. During the past forty years, which country/countries faced an existential threat?

A. Israel and the United States

B. Kuwait and Iran

C. Kurdistan and Palestine

D. Egypt and Syria

E. All of the above

Answer: B -- Israel & the United States have talked the most about being threatened, but 9/11 didn't come close to snuffing out our national entity. Israel has been threatened by its neighbors, by terrorists, by Scud rockets, but there still does not exist the "existential" threat that its leaders reference frequently. The Kurds & the Palesinians have been threatened plenty, but since they don't "exist" in any official sense, they can't be threatened with non-existence. Both Egypt and Syria may end this decade looking far different, but they will still be Egypt and Syria.

Kuwait could easily have become just a province of Iraq; Iran could have fallen to Iraq in the bloody Iran-Iraq War during the early '80s. Virtually no one was supporting Iran against the aggression of Saddam. Iraq had the support of the West. Moreover, we have 5 times the population of Iran and the GDP of the United States is 68 times that of Iran -- not surprising? But our expenditures on the military are 110 times those of Iran. Little countries often expend huge amounts of their national wealth on armaments -- for a while, some African countries were throwing about up to 50% of their treasure into fighting internal or cross-border wars or preparing for them. Iran is not in that category.

Official U.S. Government official documents (this is from a 1995 Pentagon policy statement) do not leave much doubt about what is driving our actions:

"The broad national security interests and objectives expressed in the President's National Security Strategy and the Chairman's National Military Strategy form the foundation of the US Central Command's theater strategy. The NSS directs implementation of a strategy of dual containment of the rogue states of Iraq and Iran as long as those states pose a threat to U.S. interests, to other states in the region, and to their own citizens. Dual containment is designed to maintain the balance of power in the region without depending on either Iraq or Iran. USCENTCOM's theater strategy is interest-based and threat-focused. The purpose of U.S. engagement, as espoused in the NSS, is to protect the United States' vital interest in the region - uninterrupted, secure U.S./Allied access to Gulf oil." (Keep in mind, also, that we do not just spend an enormous amount of money on military preparedness -- our military itself uses about 350,000 barrels a day of oil.)

6. From what country did Iran first source nuclear technologies?

A. Pakistan

B. Russian Federation

C. United States

D. North Korea

E. None of the above

That would be C. President Eisenhower first encouraged Iran to begin a nuclear energy program, and supplied the technologies to get it started.

The Washington Post reported that in 1976 the Ford administration “endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium - the two pathways to a nuclear bomb.” Noam Chomsky has pointed out that “the top planners of the Bush administration, who [in 2007 were] denouncing these programs, were then in key national security posts: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.” Chomsky quotes Henry Kissinger as saying recently that Iran's seeking of nuclear energy capability would be "a wasteful use of resources." But, in the time of the Shah, when Kissinger was secretary of state, he said it would "provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals." Kissinger's explanation for the discrepancy?-- that before the revolution "they were an allied country."

A study of nuclear in the energy economies of thirty countries done by IAEA showed European countries heavily reliant on nuclear fission as source of energy: 78% of France's electricity, 72% in Lithuania, 54% for Belgium. Other countries have oil or gas, but still choose to have nuclear as part of the mix: Russia and Canada at 16%, the United States and the UK at near 20%.

Iran has crude petroleum to sell, but lacks refining capabilities to fill more than a fraction of its future energy needs through fossil fuels internally. Nuclear energy represents a diversification of its energy portfolio as a hedge against rapidly evolving technologies, changing energy markets and the vagaries of international politics.

If the premier economic powerhouse of the world, the US, can't solve the energy conundrum without splitting atoms, why is Iran expected to accomplish it, with an economy smaller than that of the State of Missouri? Given that some 60% of Iranians are under the age of 30, a population boom can be expected during the coming years, like the one America saw after the Second World War.

7. Saddam Hussein made the most extensive use of chemical weapons against:

A. The Kurdish

B. Sunni Muslim Arabs

C. Shi'ite Muslim non-Arabs

D. The Turks

E. None of the above

C -- in other words, Iraq's neighbors in Iran. There are still about 50,000 Iranians, even today, who are living with the effects of the chemical weapons, as pulmonary cripples, dealing with blindness or other conditions. There are lakes in western Iran that are still incapable of supporting life. The chemicals he used were coming from companies in the United States and Germany. The United Nations eventually confirmed their use (illegal under international law), but not until after the war had ended. A few business people in Germany were prosecuted, but none here. It is important, I think, to remember that Iran's leaders decided not to use their own WMD's during the Iran-Iraq War, even though Tehran and other major cities were being bombed daily and thousands lost their lives.

8. The country that gave the most support to the Taliban in their fight against the Soviets:

A. Pakistan

B. United States

C. Iran

D. Saudi Arabia

E. None of the above

As we know, eventually, we thought better of that! Haleh Esfandiari (director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, who was a prisoner in Iran a couple of years ago) wrote in 2005: “In 1997, when [Shi'ites in Hezara] were massacred and a number of diplomats were killed [by the Taliban] in Mazar-i Sharif, Iran massed its troops at the border with Afghanistan.” She contrasts the situation of the two neighbors at that time: "While Pakistan had relations with and condoned the actions of the Taliban, Iran condemned the Taliban’s treatment of women and the excesses that were perpetrated under the name of Islam." In the same Wilson Center report, Dr. Vali Nasr (at the time, Associate Chair of Research in national security affairs at the U.S. Naval Post-Graduate School) was quoted by Esfandiari as saying:

"After 9/11…Iran’s objectives included…rekindling a dialogue with Washington based on cooperation in Afghanistan…Iran would benefit from a stable Afghanistan and a central government that can control the flow of drugs into Iran and entice Afghan refugees in Iran to return to Afghanistan…Iranians found the U.S. to be in no mood to mend fences with Iran; in fact, the U.S. was buoyed by its victory in Afghanistan and became keen to challenge Tehran’s policies. This realization changed Iran’s strategic objectives in Afghanistan. Iran began to view long-term U.S. presence in Afghanistan, a pro-American government in Kabul, and more generally a centralized Afghanistan state as strategic threats."

9. The largest number of suicide bombers has been:

A. Sri Lankan

B. Saudi

C. Palestinian

D. Iranian

E. Afghan

Iran should not even be on this list; there have been no Iranian suicide-bombers that I know about. Sri Lanka likely leads that list, being the first to use this tactic, in their long-running civil war; the last time I was in Colombo, there were troops on every single block of the downtown area, and the hotel where I stayed was bombed the week after I left . Palestinians and Afghans would come next. Saudis have certainly been implicated in the recruitment of many such bombers, in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Also left off the list: Iraqis, who might even come in first.

The "martyrs," or "suiciders" in Iran were the young men who plunged into the frontlines of the Iran-Iraq War, literally "laying down their lives for their friends and countrymen." A huge cemetery outside Tehran is full of them -- 14-year-olds who will never get any older, 17-year-olds who never had a chance to raise a family.

10. In which country adjacent to Iran does the United States has military stationed i?

A. Afghanistan

B. Iraq

C. Turkmenistan

D. Pakistan

E. Turkey

F. All of the above

The answer is F. It is important to remind ourselves how the world looks when you are in Iran, looking out. Rather like being in a circled wagon train, with the Indians massed on the edge of the buttes on all sides. But, more important even than the military presence is the impact of sanctions on the people of Iran. Asne Seierstad, a Norwegian journalist reporting from Baghdad in early 2003 gave this analysis in her book A Hundred and One Days: Fear and Friendship in a War Zone:

"Sanctions were aimed at enfeebling the regime but have actually made people more dependent on it. Sanctions have isolated the country from the outside world and have made it easier to reward loyalty and punish deviation. It is virtually impossible to operate on any large scale without the regime keeping track…

A physician friend of mine at the G.W. University Medical Center, Dr. Nader Sadeghi, found, using UNICEF figures tracking child mortality rates since the 1960’s, that infant mortality in Iraq increased from 40 per 1000 live births to over 100 between 1991 and the beginning of the U.S.-led Iraq War; mortality in children between the ages of 1 and 5 increased from 50 per 1000 (in 1990) to 125, while the comparable figure in the United States or Canada was less than 10. The instances of serious malnutrition and chronic diarrhea in the first sixteen months of occupation were above levels found in Haiti, where I have done some medical outreach in poor villages and have seen the levels of deprivation that are prevalent there. A humanitarian aid group, Save the Children, estimated that by 2005, one Iraqi child out of every eight was not making it to his or her fifth birthday. Sadeghi extrapolated from the historical data in Iraq to the potential impact in Iran, under such a sanctions regime: "There are 1,171,000 live births in Iran per year... [Under similar sanctions] 80,000 more infants will die each year. 100,000 more children between 1 and 5 will die per year."

11. Which nation has invaded a country in the Middle East in the past century?

A. Iraq

B. United States

C. Israel

D. Turkey

E. All of the above

The answer is E, all of the above. Notice who is missing?

Speaking of Israel, lets not forget that the former Iranian government, under the Shah of Iran, had significant interchange with Israel, further complicating the way Iranians view that country. In fact, some of this extended even into the post-Islamic Revolution era. A book by Trita Parsi, PhD, published in 2007, presents a superb summary of this period. Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States lays out the schizophrenic overt/covert interface between post-revolutionary Iran and Israel, which included exchange of intelligence, commerce in technology and weapons, migration from one country to another and joint training exercises -- while the public rhetoric on both sides was often abrasive and derogatory. On both sides, broad geopolitical interests have seemingly meant far more than ideology when dealing with the other nation. The height of this pragmatism was the Iran-Contra affairs, when the U.S. used Israel to supply weapons to Iran, during the Reagan presidency. Such a rapprochement could happen again, once leaders are convinced that it is in their national interest.

12. The countries and the estimated number of nuclear warheads held by each, unscrambled:

A. North Korea 4. 5 - 15

B. Iran 2. 0

C. Israel 6. 200

D. United States 5. 1790

E. Pakistan 3. 70-90

F. China 1. 240

I left off the list Number One, in terms of numbers: the Russian Federation -- as well as the US allies such as France and the UK. Our country alone has bombs that are the equivalent of 200,000 Hiroshimas. Annually, the US and its allies spend about a trillion dollars on military -- 20 times the cost of K through 12 public education in our entire country. What are we so afraid of? Clearly, just having the world's strongest military power and the widest presence is not enough to keep us safe, so you'd think we would try a different way.