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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Psychological warfare putting heat on Iran As the war of words between Iran and the United States continues to escalate, the psychological-warfare campaign of the latter is assuming greater and more sinister proportions. So much so that there are now good reasons to believe the US has orchestrated the kidnapping of a former Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps general in Istanbul. Unfortunately for Iran, the US psychological-warfare campaign seems to be working. This is evident on both the domestic and external fronts. Domestically, the Mahmud Ahmadinejad government and its allies, who favor a tough approach to nuclear negotiations, are being increasingly attacked by a broad range of political forces. Moreover, on the foreign-policy front, the Islamic Republic continues to lose ground. Having acceded to Saudi Arabia's new and more forceful diplomacy, the Iranians have now acquiesced - albeit very tentatively - to US security designs in Iraq, as evidenced by their participation in the Baghdad security conference this month. Hollywood's 2007 film adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel 300 has generated controversy everywhere, including in the United States, where critics are divided over its look, style, visuals and, more important, grossly partisan depiction of the ancient Persians. While the film's director (Zack Snyder) and executive producer (Frank Miller) protest that it is merely a historical fantasy, this does nothing to ease the violence it inflicts on modern perceptions of the ancient Persian Empire. The film 300 focuses on the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, where a small Spartan army was able to resist a much larger Persian force for several days before being defeated. True to form, this latest Hollywood portrayal of antiquity is wholly and unashamedly biased toward the ancient Greeks. The splendid spectacle of 300 lean and sculptured Spartan fighting machines fending off a vastly larger Persian army (which often appears in demonic form) is clearly pleasing to contemporary Greeks. More ominously, it is sending all the wrong signals at a critical time in Iranian-Western relations. To Iranians (both inside and outside their homeland), 300 inflicts grievous violence on their national heritage. Not surprisingly, the Persian blogosphere has been campaigning fiercely against the film, with an online petition to Warner Brothers Studios attracting more than 35,000 signatures in the first few days alone. Meanwhile, official Iran has interpreted the message of the film as US psychological warfare. Presidential cultural adviser Javad Shangari dismissed 300 as "part of a comprehensive US psychological warfare aimed at Iranian culture". The daily Ayandeh-No (New Future) went even further by running the sensational headline, "Hollywood declares war on Iranians". Most recently in his Iranian New Year (Nowrouz) message, Ahmadinejad implicitly attacked Hollywood (and by extension the US as a whole) for "trying to tamper with history by making a film and by making Iran's image look savage". This kind of official reaction to specific US cultural products is unusual, even more so because the plot is centered on Iran's pre-Islamic past, which tends to be ignored by the Islamic Republic and its supporters. The fact that an Iranian president has had to address the issue in his New Year message speaks volumes about the heightened threat perception in Tehran, where every US move in the Middle East (official or otherwise) is laboriously analyzed against a set of Iranian values, interests and ambitions. Ancient battles aside, the disappearance of a former Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) general in the Turkish city of Istanbul is being widely interpreted as the latest covert US operation against Iranian interests. Ali Reza Asgari, a former deputy defense minister under the Mohammad Khatami government and a former top commander in the IRGC, disappeared in Istanbul in early February. The Washington Post was the first major Western newspaper to claim that the former general had defected to the United States. Citing an anonymous senior US official, the paper claimed on March 8 that the former minister was cooperating with Western intelligence agencies. The London Times quickly followed the Post's lead in sensationally identifying the former general as the "father of Hezbollah" and, citing Israeli sources, claimed that Asgari had defected with his family. The Times' diplomatic editor confidently asserted that he had defected and, highlighting the alleged defection's significance, quoted Ali Ansari, a British-Iranian academic based at St Andrew's University, claiming that "there has never been a defection from Iran in the 27 years since the revolution". Strictly speaking, Ansari's comment is not true. While there has not been a single case of a senior political figure or a senior diplomat defecting, there were plenty of defections from the Iranian military, in particular the air force, in the 1980s. However, the defections stopped with the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988. It seems that a combination of greater political liberalization and the impressive competence of the Islamic Republic's intelligence services put a stop to the defections altogether. It has now emerged that much of the information in the Western and Israeli media has been inaccurate. First and foremost, Asgari is 43 years old, not 63 as has been widely alleged. Second, it has now emerged that his family, including his wife, are safe in Tehran and desperately waiting for news on the whereabouts of the former IRGC commander. Asgari's wife even told the Baztab Web site (a quality news service run by Mohsen Rezai, the former overall commander of the IRGC) that she believes her husband was kidnapped by US intelligence in Istanbul. Baztab itself has just claimed that the Turkish intelligence service is complicit in the "psychological warfare" campaign against Iran. Given that Baztab is close to top intelligence circles in Tehran, this is a strong indication that Iranian intelligence believes the Turks aided and abetted the alleged US kidnapping operation. The very nature of this story makes it very hard to ascertain the full facts. A defection, while unlikely, is not implausible. But even if he has defected, Asgari is unlikely to be as significant as the Americans are making out, simply because he had been out of the IRGC and the Iranian national-security infrastructure for a number of years. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that Asgari has fallen victim to a US kidnapping operation. There would be nothing unusual about this, since US operatives have carried out numerous kidnappings in European and Middle Eastern cities in the past few years. Most of these have related to the so-called, "war on terror" and the infamous US rendition policy (where terror suspects are handed over to their own or other governments to be tortured at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency). More specifically, US operatives have been kidnapping alleged Iranian intelligence officers in Iraq for at least 12 months. Some of these operations (such as the assault on the Iranian Consulate in Irbil in January) have been sensational public affairs, while others, such as the kidnapping of Jalal Sharafi (the second secretary at the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad) in early February, have been conducted in a more subtle fashion. Apparently Sharafi was seized by gunmen wearing the uniform of the elite 36th Commando Battalion (part of the new Iraqi Defense Ministry's special-operations forces) in Baghdad's Karrada district. No word has been heard from Sharafi since, and his abductors have not made any demands. This has lent credence to Iranian allegations that the kidnapping was carried out by Iraqi Defense Ministry agents acting at the behest of US military intelligence in Baghdad, who are anxious to maintain "plausible deniability". The assault on the consulate in Irbil and the kidnapping of Jalal Sharafi follow US President George W Bush's warning on January 10 that US forces had been instructed to seek out and destroy Iranian intelligence networks in Iraq. However, if Ali Reza Asgari has indeed been kidnapped by American agents, this would signal a significant escalation in the US campaign against Iran. It is going well beyond psychological warfare and appears to be a global campaign targeting specific Iranian intelligence assets in key locations. According to Ahmadinejad supporters, recent US provocations against Iran (whether in Iraq, Turkey or elsewhere) are designed to weaken the internal front and engineer the rise of more pragmatic forces. This is the constant theme of Web sites close to Ahmadinejad, in particular http://Rajanews.com, which seems to have been set up specifically to counter the propaganda of the camp of former president Hashemi Rafsanjani. While aggressive US posturing and the imposition of tougher United Nations sanctions on March 23 have galvanized a significant segment of the Iranian establishment against the non-compromising attitude of the Ahmadinejad government, the opposition to Ahmadinejad runs deeper. Since assuming office in August 2005, Ahmadinejad has antagonized much of the political establishment in Tehran. The rise of an unknown quantity to the highest elected office in the country is rooted in the peculiar democratic-theocratic constitutional arrangements of the Islamic Republic and the volatility of the Iranian electorate. After all, the same electorate who voted for the rugged and inexperienced Ahmadinejad in June 2005 had voted for the regal and philosophical Khatami in May 1997. The nature of factional politics in the Islamic Republic requires cautious and subtle leadership at the very top. Since the demise of ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in June 1989 (which marked the effective end of the charismatic leadership style in Iran), the office of Valiye Faqih (Supreme Jurisconsult) has played a key role in managing the conflict between the presidency and other powerful institutions, most notably the Islamic Consultative Assembly (the national parliament). But this management has only been possible since the previous presidents (namely Rafsanjani and Khatami) were experienced and subtle leaders. While the former was - by far - a more able politician, both projected a leadership style that was suited to the complex institutional setup in Iran. Moreover, both respected the ethics of consensus-building and were committed to working with other institutions (in particular the office of the supreme leader) in managing the major problems confronting the country. Ahmadinejad is a sharp departure from this tradition. He is inexperienced, abrasive and prone to clumsy (and ultimately very costly) gesture politics. As a system that is dependent on subtle and covert institutional coordination and consensus-building, the Islamic Republic values stability and wise leadership. Ahmadinejad has, up to now at least, proved incapable of rising to the standards set by previous presidents. Moreover, his fierce personality and independent power base unsettles the conservative power-brokers in the regime who, more than anyone else, understand the vulnerabilities of Iran's unique system of government. Ahmadinejad supporters, however, come from a very different tradition, one that holds that the Islamic Republic, on the basis of its revolutionary heritage and popular mandate, can overcome the toughest of challenges. It is this confidence that underpins the Ahmadinejad government's defiance in the face of mounting international pressure. There are many Iranian analysts who believe Ahmadinejad would not have survived had he not enjoyed the support of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic's supreme leader. Khamenei, more than anyone else at the top of the regime, epitomizes the Islamic Republic's ideal leadership style. He projects the kind of wisdom and statesmanship that appeals to the regime's wide socio-economic and ideological constituency. A brilliant analysis of Khamenei's stewardship and relationship with the three presidents since 1989 is provided by Baztab's Seyed Ammar Kalantari and titled "Rahbareh Enqelab va een Se Tan: Mororeh Rabeteyeh Ayatollah Khamenei ba Hashemi, Khatami va Ahmadinejad" ("The Leader of the Revolution and these Three Figures: Reviewing Ayatollah Khamenei's Relationship with Hashemi [Rafsanjani], Khatami and Ahmadinejad"). While arguing that Khamenei feels compelled to defend presidents of the Islamic Republic during times of crisis, Kalantari reasons that Khamenei's ultimate concern is to ensure that the Islamic system remains true to its core values and refrains from extremism in any ideological direction. Kalantari concludes, somewhat implicitly, that Khamenei's lack of public support for Ahmadinejad in recent months may be due to his government's perceived extremism and over-ambition. By indirectly alluding to last year's Holocaust conference in Tehran, Kalantari highlights the Ahmadinejad government's gravest violation of the traditions and etiquette of the Islamic Republic's executive branch. Kalantari says Khamenei is decidedly against the kind of solution proposed by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iraq's Saddam Hussein (which involved expelling the Jews from Palestine) and instead favors a referendum in Palestine that should settle the future of that country. In any case, the expulsion of the Jewish population is out of the question. This revisiting of the highly controversial Holocaust conference indicates the extent to which key power centers were incensed by the Ahmadinejad's government's puerile gesture politics. After all, many influential Iranians argue, what does Iran have to do with a genocide committed by Western Europeans more than 60 years ago? But fortunately for Iran, no single personality or institution determines foreign policy. On this basis, it would be unfair to lay all the blame for recent geopolitical retreats on Ahmadinejad and his inner circle. It seems that the entire Iranian national-security infrastructure is reacting negatively to pervasive and intense US pressure. My previous article on this subject explained how Iran was acceding to a more aggressive Saudi policy in the region in the hope of gaining some relief from US pressure. Since then, Iran has participated in the US security conference in Baghdad. While it may have been worthwhile for the Iranians to attend the conference, there is no doubt that Iran's participation was more beneficial to US interests in the region than Iran's. After all, Iran is in a powerful position in Iraq; for the time being at least it has no need to discuss Iraq-related issues with the US on Washington's terms. In the final analysis, US pressure is yielding results. The Iranian domestic scene is becoming increasingly agitated and US psychological warfare reinforces the aggravation. Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic is showing a greater willingness to accommodate US interests in the region. But the long-term effect of mounting US pressure remains unknown. The country as a whole is committed to nuclear development and there is little the Americans can do to curtail Iran's widespread and natural influence in the region. In fact, increasing US pressure may lead to a political configuration that is better suited to advancing Iran's interests in the region. Psychological warfare (no matter how intense and pervasive) has its limits; moreover, it can backfire. US policymakers ought to bear that in mind.
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#1. To: Eoghan, Brian S, Christine, Honway, Robin, Aristeides, Diana, All (#0)
There is some natural nervousness seen in Iran - add the expected political battling. BUT - if there's any pressure actually coming to bear, some 15 British sailors have a different point of view. I'd call this one "hopeful bullshit."
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