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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Most believe that the president's speech was ignorant bullying that will only slow reform.
Feb 7, 2002 | A few days before the 23rd anniversary of the Islamic revolution, the streets of Tehran are decorated with candy-colored lights. Despite the decorations, there had been no aura of revolutionary zeal in the city. But that was before President Bush's State of the Union speech, in which he shocked political observers, diplomats and ordinary Iranians by singling out Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, as part of an "axis of evil." Now, anti-American sloganeering has returned.
Bush charged that Iran aids terrorism by providing aid to the militant Islamic groups Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been locked in a violent conflict with Israel for years. He also warned that Iran was actively seeking nuclear weapons. In addition, U.S. officials have warned that Iran, which fronts Afghanistan's western border, has been trying to destabilize the new government and possibly sheltering al-Qaida fugitives.
Bush's speech dismayed Iranians of all political stripes. Reformers and conservatives have been locked in a bitter power struggle, but they suspended their infighting to make common cause against a speech widely regarded here as bullying, ignorant and counterproductive.
Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, denied the charges and asked the U.S. to produce factual proof of Iran's involvement in production of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. As a sign of protest, the minister cancelled a visit to the World Economic Forum in New York.
Iran's leaders fired back fiercely. The country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, called the tone of the U.S. president's speech "bloodthirsty." President Khatami, leader of the reformers, was equally blunt. During his five years in office, Khatami has made a concerted effort to tone down hostile rhetoric toward the U.S. as part of a more pragmatic foreign policy, but he condemned Bush's demonizing of Iran as "meddling, warmongering, insulting and a repetition of old propaganda." It was perhaps the strongest language Khatami has yet used against the U.S., and belied his dismay at the abrupt change in the U.S. position towards Iran, which most observers believe has been softening in the past four years.
The clerical establishment has launched a forceful campaign of rebuttal over the past few days, filling the front pages of Iranian newspapers with angry pieces whose tenor summons up the darkest days of the troubled U.S.-Iran relationship.
At a special Friday prayer held at the shrine of Ayatollah Khomeini and broadcast on national radio and television, a prominent conservative cleric, Ayatollah Ahmad Janati, expressed doubts about Bush's sanity, but scoffed that such outbursts should not be surprising when "cowboys and gambling-house managers from Nevada become presidents in the U.S." (It was unclear who Janati was referring to; such employment does not appear on President Bush's resumé.)
The spokesman of the powerful Guardian Council, which oversees all legislation to make sure it adheres to the values of the Islamic Revolution, called for unity among Iran's internal camps -- an appeal that would have little chance of being heard before Bush's speech.
At least for now, Washington's aggressive new stance toward Iran appears to have played into the hands of the conservative clergy, which is facing the greatest challenge to its rule in recent years from the reformist parliament. Even those reformist groups that are the most amenable to eventual reestablishment of ties with the U.S. were forced to condemn Bush's speech. The leading reformist party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front (IIPF), which won a majority in the parliament two years ago, simultaneously condemned the U.S. president's statement and criticized the hard-liners, charging that their policies have played into the hands of anti-Iran elements in the U.S. and Israel, whose aggressive lobbying against Iran is widely believed here to have been the decisive factor in Bush's hawkish speech.
"Bush's statement will only help obstruct the course of democracy in Iran," says Saiid Leylaz, a reformist journalist close to the IIPF. He denounced the U.S. stance on Iran as simplistic compared to that of its European allies. "The Europeans understand that the rulership in Iran is not homogeneous," Leylaz said. "They understand that Iran is ruled by [different] factions. The solution is to strengthen democracy in Iran, and that cannot be achieved by weakening the reformists."
