Ahmadinejad on pysäytettävä

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14 April 2006
DOES IRANIAN FANATIC WANT TO WIPE OUT THE WEST?
By DAVID EDWARDS

THIS morning, like every Friday morning for 25 years, students will mass at Tehran University to chant “Death to America”, “Death to Israel” and occasionally “Death to Britain”.

Until now the weekly ritual was seen as mere sound and fury. Just the routine rhetoric of a government-assembled mob yelling the usual slogans for the Islamic Republic of Iran and its turbaned mullahtocracy.

But now things have changed. The chants edge towards reality. Iran has thrown down a gauntlet to the world.

This week President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced his country had succeeded in enriching uranium. On Wednesday the deputy boss of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation revealed plans for production on an industrial scale.

He said the number of centrifuges at Natanz, the country’s nuclear headquarters, would rise from 164 to 3,000 by the end of this year and to 54,000 in a time yet to be announced.

Whenever that is, Iran would be able to make a nuclear bomb 16 days later, the US State Department warned yesterday. So the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief, Mohammed ElBaradei, lands in Tehran to beg Iranian scientists to stop it.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeats she will not rule out military action against Iran and Britain’s former UN ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock pleads for diplomacy on an international scale.

Why are they all so worried? Iran insists it only wants nuclear power to meet its energy needs. Perhaps its critics are unconvinced because the nation sits on top of some of the largest oil and gas reserves in the world.

But why shouldn’t Iran have nuclear weapons? Britain, America, Israel, China, France, Russia, India, Pakistan and, it’s believed, North Korea, all have.

Because Iran, they say, is different, little more than a pariah state – even as the West does business with it.

IRAN, they say, cannot have nuclear bombs supporting its fundamentalist, terror-financing, hate-spouting leaders.

President Ahmadinejad calls for Israel to be “wiped off the map”, describes the Holocaust as a myth and yesterday told his critics in the West “to keep on being angry and die from it”.

Well, the President should know about anger. It has fuelled his career.

His spiritual adviser, Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, believes Iran must cut itself off completely from the corrupting West. And then overrun it.

Both men believe in the return of the Mehdi or Hidden Imam, who disappeared aged five 1,100 years ago. The imam’s return will be preceded by global chaos and bloodshed, after which the world will be conquered.

Ahmadinejad has offered his services to the Mehdi, promising to help him on his return journey. But how did this painfully thin little man reach the top?

That depends on who you ask. Officially, he was born in a village out-side Tehran in 1956, the son of a blacksmith. He excelled at school and university and gained a PhD in traffic and transport from Tehran’s University of Science and Technology.

Unofficially, he barely attended classes, excelled at pro-mullah politics and was awarded his doctorate because his supervisors were too frightened to fail him.

A university lecturer described how he asked one of the supervisors outright: “How could you give an idiot like him a PhD?”

“He has powerful friends, so how could I not?” his friend replied.

Ahmadinejad’s role in the 1979 revolution is also murky. Several of the 52 Americans held hostage in the US embassy swear he was one of their captors. He denies this, as do several of the known hostage-takers who are now his political opponents.

During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war he is said to have been involved in “covert operations”, never revealed.

As mayor and governor of areas in the north west, it is said he took offence at women and men dancing in the same room at a wedding, pulled out a gun and shot the groom.

Whether this story is true or false, it is one of many circulated about this angry little man.

Of course, such tales are not told when the Revolutionary Guards, protectors of Ayatollah Khomeini’s legacy, are around.

For the most part these men are simple and poorly educated. They are not above accepting the odd bribe, but they do walk in fear of their masters. And Ahmadinejad is one.

WHEN he became mayor of Tehran in 2003 he curtailed many of the reforms put in place by the moderates before him.

Finally, last June he landed the big job. His campaign focused on poverty, social justice and the distribution of wealth in Iran.

Supporters emphasised his own simple lifestyle. The small flat; the fact that he spent no money on his campaign – in contrast to his rival Rafsanjani, who has spent the past quarter century enriching himself and his family with the spoils of revolution.

And so Ahmadinejad was elected by the poor. Since then he has done little for them. He talks; he waves the nuclear stick at the West; he has played upon Iran’s strong nationalistic streak, covering cracks in his domestic policy along the way.

After all, this is a country with an ancient, glittering civilisation. One which lost millions of people in that war against a US-backed Saddam. One which sees daily reminders in posters, statues, shrines to so many recent martyrs along the traffic-clogged streets of Tehran.

But there is another Iran. It has education, ambition and youth. Seventy per cent of Iranians are under 30 and they yearn for a better life.

They watch satellite TV. They surf the net (Farsi, the Iranian tongue, is the second most-used language on the internet). They have relatives all over the world – two million in California alone.

They want a slice of the action, not the threat of a flogging. And they are the coming generation, coming faster than the Hidden Imam, no matter what his friend the President may try.

They are the generation the West should trust. For one day Iran will be a country to do business with. Surely better, then, to win their hearts and minds than drop our bombs on them.

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