More articles by Brian JosepherInterview with Bill James, America’s Foremost Iranian Expert, part IIInterview with Bill James, America’s Foremost Iranian Expert, part II
In this third of a now five-part series (originally I planned on a four-part series) I take a closer look at the tragedy of American-Iranian relations. In this second of a two-part interview I sit down with America’s foremost Iranian expert, Professor Bill James. Our first part focused on such subjects as the Khomeini revolution, Israel and the scandals known as the October Surprise and Iran-Contra. In this part we talk about President Ahmadinejad, the nuclear threat, and a man named George Bush. (To read the first part of my interview with Professor James or the first part of this five-part series (American’s first look at Khomeini), please click on the link “More articles by Brian Josepher” above. You will see the articles to the right.)
Q: Let’s jump to the 21st century. We have this pariah leader in Ahmadinejad… How does he pronounce his name?
James: Ah-mah-dih-nee-ZAD.
Q: Thank you. His rhetoric, from nuclear proliferation to Holocaust denial, is all about inflaming the division between the West and the Middle East. What is this guy’s MO? Is he really trying to be a pan-Arabist?
James: Pan-Arabist isn’t the right word. Our biggest prejudices in this country are towards whom, African-Americans and Hispanics?
Q: Gays and atheists.
James: Neither of which exist in Iran, according to the official rhetoric. But in Iran the biggest prejudices are towards the Afghanis and the Arabs. There’s a big segment of the country that has never forgiven the Arabs for the Islamic invasion… fifteen hundred years ago! And it brought to Iran the religion they so deeply cherish! But no Iranian wants to be called a pan-Arabist. Better to be a CIA operative.
(James Bill laughed at his joke. The CIA has a permanent stain in the minds of Iranians. In 1953, a skeletal crew of CIA operatives removed the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, in a coup. In America, only the top echelon of power – President Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, his brother Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA – knew of America’s role. In Iran, everybody knew. “It was written on every street corner,” Firoozeh Khofidian, one of Iran’s leading journalists and a teenager at the time, wrote in her memoir/history of the Khomeini revolution, Grogan giri ro yadam myad or I Remember the Hostage Takeover. “From that day forward we lived in fear of the CIA. We realized just who was running the government. Certainly not the Shah. He fled to Rome when the coup started. And certainly not his subordinate Hoveyda [the longtime prime minister]. No, the CIA was in control. And if the CIA could inflict one coup upon us, why not another and another and another?”)
Q: I can understand the prejudice towards the Arabs but why the Afghanis?
James: Afghanistan is to Iran as Mexico is to the United States. The underbelly. The immigrant population. Afghanis go to Iran to make money for their families back home. That’s how poor it is in Afghanistan: Iran, the land of 25 percent unemployment and 18 percent inflation, is the land of plenty. The Afghanis do the jobs that the Mexicans do here, so they’re categorized as uneducated, semi-dangerous imbeciles.
I’ll tell you a story to illustrate my point. In the first presidential election after the Khomeini revolution there was a politician named Ahmad Madani. He was the minister of defense and he decided to run for president. In the days before the election he was running second in the polls. Then a rumor crashed his candidacy. Madani’s father, according to the rumor, was an Afghani. Turns out, actually, that the rumor was true. But Madani didn’t stand a chance with such a rumored family background. He dropped out of the race.
Q: So if Ahmadinejad isn’t a pan-Arabist, what is he?
James: An opportunist. Essentially, Ahmadinejad is running down a list known to inflame the West. For Ahmadinejad, saying outrageous things wins him the admiration of the Israel-haters. Now is he the second coming of Nassar, or even Gaddafi? No, I would argue that he’s a politician. Unlike those other two, he’s not a visionary. He’s a man of many simplicities. He’s the Ronald Reagan of his era. The Reagan equation was uncomplicated: the Soviet Union as the evildoers, less federal government, deregulation. The Ahmadinejad equation is a trust between the ruler and the ruled, hard work and faith in God.
Q: Sounds like George Bush.
James: Yes, I agree. There’s a popular joke in Iran. You’ll like this. There are three things that Bush and Ahmadinejad share. Both came to power in contested elections. Both talk to God. And neither speaks English.
Q: What’s the Iranian presidency like as an institution? How much power does the president actually have? Who does he have to subordinate himself to? I know the Iranian presidency is nothing like the American presidency.
James: Correct. The Iranian presidency has no control over foreign policy, no control over uranium enrichment. You’re right, this isn’t the presidency of the United States in which the president can bomb, bomb and bomb some more and then go to Congress and explain. This is the Iranian presidency, a public face to the mullah power. Ahmadinejad lives in a small home in a lower middle class neighborhood of Tehran. Imagine the president of the United States living in Southeast D.C. Imagine George Bush ever living in a small house.
The Iranian president has no veto power. He can be overruled by elected leaders in the parliament and by unelected officials, those loyal to the Supreme Leader. There are layers of clergy which Ahmadinejad, or any president, must answer to. There’s a layer of senior clergy, the grand ayatollahs who do not hold public office. There’s the Guardian Council, a governing body whose sole duty, seemingly, is to build an Islamic nation, a government of God. The Guardian Council consists of 12 members, 6 Muslim clerics and 6 jurists. The clerics are appointed by the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. The jurists are appointed by the head of the judiciary. And guess who appoints the head of the judiciary?
Q: Ali Khamenei?
James: You got it. The Guardian Council can veto any bill passed by the parliament. This is the power behind the power. I’ll give you a statistic. The Islamic Republic of Iran elected a reformist president in 1997, Mohammad Khatami. A very popular, very dignified fellow, with an eye for the ladies. Sort of the John Kennedy of his day. Khatami’s influence changed the parliament to a more reformist body. From 1997 to 2004, one year before Khatami left office, the parliament passed 295 pieces of legislation. The Guardian Council blocked 111 of those laws, calling them “too reformist.” What does that mean “too reformist”?
Q: So if Iran someday decides to bomb Israel, for instance, that decision will not be made by Ahmadinejad?
James: Exactly. That decision will be made by Ali Khamenei and his Guardian Council, in consultation with leading grand ayatollahs. Ahmadinejad will then become the public face. He’ll have to spin it in some way. Of course Ahmadinejad is best at spin. For a man trained as an engineer in traffic planning, he’s the best publicist-in-a-crisis I’ve ever seen. Britney Spears should take note.
Q: How popular is Ahmadinejad today? We hear that he’s lost his constituency and he might lose in the election next year. Is that true?
James: His popularity doesn’t really matter. There’s no such thing as free elections. If there were, Ahmadinejad would never have been elected in 2005. He stole that election – or, the election was stolen for him – and he’ll steal 2009. In Iran, there are two powerhouses that determine elections. The first is the Vali-e faqih, or the Supreme Leader or Supreme Jurist. Now, Ali Khamenei is no Ruhollah Khomeini but nobody doubts his power. The second is the Revolutionary Guard. And guess what? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a founding member. He joined the guard in the early 1980s. He has their total support. And why wouldn’t he? When he came to power, Ahmadinejad appointed Revolutionary Guard commanders to fill his cabinet and to run the intelligence agencies. The government of Iran today is basically an offshoot of the Revolutionary Guard.
(For a brief history of the Revolutionary Guard, including the PLO’s influence, please see my article at http://entertainment.enterto.com/rss_article_bjosepher.html?e=6331.)
Q: Let’s talk about the election of 2005. How did Ahmadinejad gain power?
James: Ahmadinejad was a no-name politician about five weeks before the election. Yes, he was the mayor of Tehran but that was an appointed position. Ahmadinejad had never won an election in his life. Right before the election nearly every pundit predicted a victory by one of three men, Akbar Rafsanjani (a former president and Khomeini confidant), Mohammad Qalibaf (a conservative and the current mayor of Tehran) and Mostafa Moin. Moin inherited the reform mantle from Mohammad Khatami, who couldn’t run again due to term limits.
Now there was another candidate, Mehdi Karrubi…
Q: Khomeini’s foreign minister?
James: Khomeini’s de facto foreign minister. He never actually held the job. There were official foreign ministers throughout the 1980s, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, Rajai who resigned to become prime minister, the long-serving Velayati. The true power lay with Karrubi. He negotiated behind the scenes.
In the election of 2005 Karrubi discovered an effective campaign pledge. He promised to give every adult Iranian a monthly handout of $62. That pledge – or bribe, if you prefer – catapulted him into the top echelon of candidates. Ahmadinejad in the days leading up to the election never entered the top echelon of candidates.
Now, in an Iranian election, if one candidate doesn’t win 50 percent of the vote, there’s a runoff one week later between the two top vote getters. When Karrubi went to sleep on the night of the election, he was in second place by almost a million votes, according to exit polls. When he awoke a few hours later and listened to the official results, he was shocked. Ahmadinejad had leapfrogged him and moved into second place, behind Rafsanjani.
Karrubi took the unusual measure of calling a press conference. “Money passed hands,” he said, meaning that the electorate had been paid for voting for Ahmadinejad. He also wrote a letter to Ali Khamenei. Karrubi claimed that there were all sorts of anomalies and, get this, that Khamenei’s own son had interfered in the election.
No surprise, when Ahmadinejad became president one of his first directives was to order the house arrest of Mehdi Karrubi. Three years later, he’s still under house arrest.
Q: What sorts of anomalies took place?
James: Well, first and foremost, 62 percent of the population voted in the election. Normally that figures hovers in the low 40s. So that suggests some abnormality. In one of Iran’s heavy Sunni provinces, 95 percent of the province voted. That might be weird but here’s more weirdness. Ahmadinejad won the province. Now why would Sunnis vote for a Shia zealot? It doesn’t make sense.
Q: Well, if you believe Bush and McCain, those same Shia are supporting the Sunnis of al-Qaeda in Iraq. I suppose that doesn’t make sense either.
James: Let me just touch on that. Iran’s biggest threat is not the United States and it’s not Israel. Iran’s biggest threat is the Taliban. The Taliban in Afghanistan made Iran look almost secular. The Taliban tried to export their Islamist ways, focused supremely on Sunni doctrine, into Iran. Of course, the greatest ally of the Taliban was al-Qaeda. Still is. Can you see why Iran would never support al-Qaeda? Al-Qaeda wants to bring the Taliban back to Afghanistan, the thought of which abhors Iran.
Q: So it’s just a publicity ploy for Bush/McCain?
James: Perhaps. Or perhaps they really believe their rhetoric. We all know about the education of George Bush, but John McCain is not exactly an expert on the Middle East.
Q: George Bush, it can be argued, fit the psyche of the American electorate. The psyche of the electorate seems to have changed, and this perhaps explains the possibility of Barack Obama. Does Ahmadinejad fit the psyche of the Iranian electorate?
James: That’s an excellent question. Iran is poorer now than it’s ever been, even with a full 10 percent of the world’s oil exports. Iran has the highest proportion of opiate addicts in the world, according to the U.N. World Drug Report of 2005: 2.8 percent of the population. No other country rises above the 2 percent mark. Iran has a major brain drain occurring, with the largest diaspora by far. Over four million Iranians have emigrated since the Khomeini revolution. It’s basically eviscerated the intelligentsia class. The student class is monitored and kept in check. The mullah class is stronger than ever. Does Ahmadinejad fit the psyche of the electorate? I suppose so, particularly the psyche of the electorate that isn’t shackled or hasn’t fled.
As for the American electorate, it should be noted that the election of Bush didn’t cause a diaspora.
Q: Yet. If McCain becomes president, I’m moving to Baghdad. I think it will be safer there.
James: Baghdad’s beautiful in the spring.
Q: Today, Iran strikes me as a powerful nation. Has Ahmadinejad given his country confidence?
James: Good question. Consider the climate a few years ago. In 2002/2003 Afghanistan and Iraq, two of Iran’s neighbors, fell to American forces. Pakistan, another neighbor, seemed to be in bed with the Americans. The Turks, another neighbor, allied themselves with the Americans. Iran was a claustrophobic nation, with America seemingly on all sides, including in the Persian Gulf.
In addition President Bush was going around proclaiming his “axis of evil.” Iraq had been checked off the list. Negotiations were proceeding with North Korea. That left Iran. Within the country, an invasion seemed imminent.
In early 2003 the government of President Khatami quietly sent a proposal to the White House for comprehensive negotiations. What would Iran concede? Apparently, Iran was willing to address its ties to groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. In addition, Iran promised to allow inspectors into its nuclear sites. In return, Iran hoped for the lifting of sanctions and the beginning of foreign investments, both keys to improving Iran’s economy. The Bush White House rejected the proposal without so much as a thank you note.
Five years later the power has shifted. If the Bush administration sent a similar proposal to the Iranians, calling for negotiations, the Iranians would behave exactly as Bush did back in 2003. With silence. The fact is, the Bush administration is a dying beast. Or how else do you explain Iran’s provocative delays in responding to any diplomatic overtures concerning its nuclear program? Has Ahmadinejad given his country confidence? Yes. The threat level has been reduced. While America and its color code has the threat level at the second highest, or orange, Iran’s threat level is down there in the low range, at green.
That’s ironic, of course. Green is the color of Islam.
Q: And money.
James: American money. Which appears to be as strong as the Bush administration.
Q: Let’s talk about Iran’s nuclear program. I recently attended a lecture given by the Israeli historian Michael Oren. Despite America’s recent National Intelligence Estimate, he claims that Iran’s uranium enrichment program will be nuclear capable some time in the early summer, a mere two months from now. What’s your reaction to that? And do you think that Iran will bomb Israel?
James: I have no information on Iran’s uranium enrichment program. I can only say that those plants are built near major cities. Natanz, for instance, is south of Tehran. There’s a nuclear research center at Karaj, west of Tehran. There’s a nuclear technology center in Isfahan. So if the United States strikes one or all of these centers, what will be the damages? If the U.S. hits the Natanz site with a nuclear bomb, as has been rumored, what will that mean for Tehran? The ramifications are unfathomable. (For the Bush’s alleged plans, please see Seymour Hersh’s “The Iran Plans” in The New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/17/060417fa_ fact.)
As for Iran bombing Israel, the Iranian rhetoric from Khamenei on down is that Iran will only respond, Iran will never order the first strike. Now, if the United States hits an Iranian nuclear facility, Iran has missiles – non-nuclear, at this point – capable of reaching Israel. Hezbollah and Hamas have pledged to retaliate on Iran’s behalf. As we saw last summer, Hezbollah is more than a thorn in Israel’s side. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, is a revered figure in Iran. So is Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’s leader. And who knows about Syria? The point is, Iran has significant allies.
(Bill James took a moment to stare at the poster of Ayatollah Khomeini on the wall. In the poster, a headshot of Ayatollah Khomeini, the grim, black eyes seemed to shout, “Allaahu Akbar. Marg bar Amreeka. Marg bar Shah.” God is great. Death to America. Death to the Shah. Suddenly, Bill James slapped his leg.)
James: You know, Khomeini shut down Iran’s nuclear program back in the 1980s. He didn’t believe that his country needed that kind of defense system. Of course, back then he didn’t have a nuclear Pakistan on his eastern border and a nuclear India beyond.
Khomeini also believed in the Palestinian cause and the same holds true today. Iran, more than any other Muslim country, supports the Palestinians. Maybe that will work in humanity’s favor. Will Iran send a nuclear bomb Israel’s way, knowing the damage it will inflict upon the Palestinian population? I don’t know the answer to that.
I can tell you this. It doesn’t help that the American Secretary of State goes to her own Congress and asks for $75 million to promote democracy in Iran. (Congress allocated $56 million, as opposed to $3.5 million the year earlier.) It only fuels the paranoia. It only makes the leadership of Iran more nuclear thirsty.
Q: And helps in getting Ahmadinejad reelected next year.
James: That’s a given, Brian. Unless he runs afoul of Khamenei. Then you might see a change.
Q: Is there a successor to Ahmadinejad?
James: Among the conservatives, Mohammad Qalibaf, the mayor of Tehran. Among the reformers, Mostafa Moin is still around. And then there is Reza Khatami, former President Khatami’s brother. He’s the dark horse. Not only is he calling for a secular Iran but there’s been a great deal of revisionism in Iran concerning his brother’s presidency. Just how successful was it? If Iranians judge that it wasn’t successful, then the brother suffers the backlash.
Q: There are a great many topics still left to discuss with you, Professor James. For instance, I haven’t really touched on Ahmadinejad and his anti-Semitic rhetoric or his call for sex changes for gay men. But time and space necessitate that we wrap this up. For my last question I want to return to your joke about Ahmadinejad and Bush. There is evidence to suggest that he does speak English. Ahmadinejad, I mean. He participated in the takeover of the American embassy in 1979. He was one of the student-militants. While those student-militants overran the embassy, American diplomats inside were destroying records in a shredder. Ahmadinejad, according to various reports, taped those records back together. The records of course were in English. He would have to have known English to do so.
James: I’ve heard a lot of rumors on a lot of subjects, Brian. But that’s the first time I’ve ever heard of that one. I guess you’ll have to go to the source.
Q: I plan to, Professor James. Thank you for your time and expertise. I hope we can do this again.
James: I certainly would like that.
Bill James has spent the last forty years specializing in Iran and the extended Middle East. He holds a B.A. degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Baylor University. He is the John Bard Professor of History at Bard College. Below is a list of his books. All of them, with the exception of the last, are available for purchase:
James, Bill. The Lion and the Eagle: the Heartbreak of American-Iranian Relations.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
---––. The Hope of Ghotbzadeh. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
–––. The Eyes of Islam: A Political Biography of Ruhollah Khomeini. New York:
HarperCollins, 1994.
–––. In the Footsteps of an Outlaw: A Relative Traces the Life and Times of Jesse James.
Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
–––. Fahd the Fanaan: A Biography of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2010. Sponsored by EnterTo.com the first REAL spam free email
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