Friday 17 August 2012

ALI KHAMENEI, THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE WORLD.

The Most Dangerous Man in the World

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Ali Khamenei

AUG 20, 2012, VOL. 17, NO. 45 • BY REUEL MARC GERECHT

One of the startling cultural disconnects in studying Iran is how unimpressive
 the officials of the Islamic Republic usually are. Reading Persian history
inclines one to expect Iranians to be highly cultured and nuanced, delicately
 balanced between a conservative religious faith and a love of refinement
and pleasure. Remember the Persian vizier to the Turkish Seljuk sultans,
the eleventh-century Nizam al-Mulk, whose “mirror for princes” is a forerunner
 to Machiavelli’s reflections on power.

Or the sixteenth-century Shah Abbas the Great and his astonishing, often
 inebriated, court in Isfahan, which solidified Persian as the lingua franca among
 Muslim elites. Or even, in more mundane, modern times, Amir Asadollah Alam,
 a minister to both Pahlavi shahs, with his enormous capacity to marry tradition
to modernity, a skill that his last boss sorely lacked. But the days of such
accomplished men are long gone. Iran’s ruling class today is incapable of
attracting the country’s best and brightest. In their place have risen corrupt and
crude ideologues, who have made Iranian society, even for the devout, often
unpleasant and embarrassing. And what happens internally works its way abroad. 
 Ali Khamenei

ALI KHAMENEI
NEWSCOM
Although the Islamic Republic is
 moving ever closer to obtaining a
nuclear weapon, the ruling caste
—Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
in particular—has not been adroit
 in advancing the cause. Western
 indecision, timidity, and greed rather
 than Iranian diplomatic skill and strategic
 acumen have permitted the steady
progress of the nuclear program. If the
supreme leader had more Persian
wiliness, Tehran would surely get its
nuke with far less damage to the economy
 than it is suffering. The possibility of an
American or Israeli preemptive strike would
 be far more remote. The odds that Khamenei’s aggressive, small-minded faith would
 lead his country into a war with Israel and the United States would be much lower
 than they are.
The Islamic Republic’s most powerful figures seem incapable of escaping their
revolutionary religious identities and acknowledging their own rich culture, let alone
 the Western, mostly Marxist, ideas that have so profoundly shaped them.
 Read Ali Larijani, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, on Western philosophy,
a subject in which he reportedly got a Ph.D., and marvel at the contortion of his
 thinking, at the inferiority complex that makes a good mind seem stupid. A close
 confidant of the supreme leader, a former nuclear negotiator and commander in
the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Larijani is incapable of playful conversation with
 non-Muslims—something that comes easily to your average Persian Muslim.
Instrumental in crushing Iran’s liberal intellectual efflorescence in the 1990s,
 Larijani is not unique: The revolutionary elite today has an enormously difficult
time so much as saying “hello” to those who have not sprung from its world. 
The Iranian regime really should have been able to outplay the West in the
recent P5+1 nuclear meetings in Istanbul, Baghdad, and Moscow. Contrary to
what is sometimes written on the American right, they manifestly did not. The
Europeans and the Americans held firm, though they wanted to deal. Even more
than President Barack Obama, the Europeans want to avoid an Israeli preemptive
 strike. In the White House and in Europe, there is little appetite for more
impoverishing sanctions. All would prefer to stop, if the Iranians would only
adhere—perhaps just pretend to adhere—to the Non-Proliferation Treaty,
 which Iran signed and ratified in 1970 and which actually allows a lot of
 maneuvering room for a nuke-seeking deceitful state. 

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