The Middle East:
What Ahmadinejad Thinks He's Doing

By Abbas Milani

Hezbollah is Iran’s tool in exporting revolution. But a lot of the power brokers in Tehran don’t want to risk their $70 billion a year in oil loot on a group of crazies in southern Lebanon. By Abbas Milani.

The crisis in Lebanon was a rude awakening for Iran’s populist, fiery, and forked-tongue president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His dangerous messianic rhetoric crashed on the hard rocks of geopolitics and on the even harder reality that the rest of the Iranian regime is reluctant to support anything that seriously endangers their control of $70 billion a year in petro-loot. The fissures within the regime in Tehran appeared pronounced in the beginning of the Lebanon crisis. Once the crisis ended—and the regime was assured of Hezbollah’s survival—the tension gave way to the regime’s collective effort to score political points at the expense of the United States and Israel. Ahmadinejad came to power as the head of a surprisingly powerful cabal of Revolutionary Guard commanders, leading members of the Basij (the militia–cum–street gang who are the regime’s enforcers), and some stridently messianic clergy who expect the imminent return of the Mahdi (Shiism’s missing messiah, in hiding for almost a millennium). On more than one occasion, Ahmadinejad has said that the main function of his administration is to facilitate the return of the hidden messiah. This rhetoric has introduced into Iranian political discourse the notion of Mahdaviyat, or messianism. The messiah’s return, according to Shiism, is preceded by cataclysms of apocalyptic proportions. But the suffering and mayhem that accompany the return will be followed by an eternity of salvation—a story eerily similar to the stories favored by Christian fundamentalists, jubilant over what they think is the coming of Armageddon. But fundamentalist delusions and dreams do not generally make good policy—they usually wind up in conflict with realpolitik. Ahmadinejad’s Mahdaviyat has been no exception.

In the first few weeks of his presidency, he and his supporters took the Iranian political scene by storm. Mixed with his populism was his attempt to revitalize the regime’s revolutionary spirit. He wanted to return to the days when Ayatollah Khomeini was alive and advocating the export of the revolution.

Ahmadinejad’s opponents, and even his allies, including spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were surprised by his ideological intransigence, his dangerous international brinkmanship, particularly in the nuclear negotiations, and his many verbal faux pas—accompanied by a struggling economy—that embarrassed the regime (most famously his absurd anti-Semitic denial of the Holocaust). Gradually and inexorably, the rest of the leadership tried to muzzle him and limit the damage caused by his dangerous and careless rhetoric. But his populism, his reputation for financial probity, and the support of the Revolutionary Guards and the Basijis have made him difficult to muzzle.

Exporting the Revolution

The hostilities in Lebanon provided a new opportunity for Ahmadinejad to promote his aggressive new paradigm of exporting the Islamic revolution and creating a “Shiite revolutionary arc” in the Muslim world. In this vision, Iran will be the ideological leader, military supplier, and financial supporter of an international brotherhood.

Ahmadinejad’s first response to the crisis was to condemn Israel and predict its annihilation. He followed by inviting all Muslims to support their Shiite brethren in Lebanon, but the call fell on deaf ears. His later call for an immediate emergency meeting of leaders of Muslim countries was also ignored in other Middle East capitals—even though the leaders are worried about an emergent assertive Iran and a Shiite brotherhood.

Even in Iran, the rest of the leadership adopted a wait-and-see posture—paying lip service to Hezbollah as brave and valiant soldiers of Islam, yet taking no practical steps that would entangle Iran in the hostilities.

When a shady semi-official organization registering “volunteers for martyrdom” announced that it was sending two small teams of “martyr-seekers” to Lebanon, the government quickly distanced itself. When a group of parliament deputies announced their decision to go to Lebanon to show solidarity with Hezbollah, the Speaker, Hadad-Adel, who is connected to Khamenei by blood and politics, immediately canceled the trip. Finally, anecdotal evidence from inside Iran, including reports by Western journalists, showed that the Iranian people have no stomach for entering the war between Israel and Hezbollah.

The fate of Ahmadinejad’s style of politics is profoundly entangled with that of Hezbollah. His aggressive paradigm of politics is founded on the idea that Islamist forces around the world can, through action and unity, become an invincible force and defeat both the West and Israel. Exporting the revolution and standing up to the West, Ahmadinejad believes, can and will bring victory.

A corollary is the proposition that, on the nuclear issue, only by forcefully continuing enrichment activities and ignoring Western offers of carrot or threats of stick can the Islamic regime maintain its dignity and achieve its goals.

If Hezbollah’s power and prestige had been debilitated in the aftermath of the war, then the Ahmadinejad camp would have been deprived of its most important tool for exporting the revolution. Such a defeat would also have diminished the Islamic Republic’s arsenal in its negotiations with the West over its nuclear program.

As it happened, Hezbollah survived the attacks relatively intact, and its power and prestige increased not just in Lebanon but throughout the Arab world. As a result, Ahmadinejad’s agenda of exporting the revolution and pushing ahead with the nuclear program has gained some strength.

Ironically, the war had another consequence. For the past few years, unleashing Hezbollah rockets on Israel was consistently one of the biggest threats the Islamic regime in Tehran used against the West and Israel. Now that card has been played, and the results must have been disappointing for strategists in Tehran. Inside Iran, the ascent of the Ahmadinejad cabal has brought about a further dismantling of civil society and retarded any movement toward democracy.

The greatest tragedy is that the heavy human price for Ahmadinejad’s high-stakes agenda is ultimately paid by the people of Iran, whose aspirations for democracy are on the line.

Available from the Hoover Press is A Practical Guide to Winning the War on Terrorism, edited by Adam Garfinkle. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

Abbas Milani is a research fellow and codirector of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. In addition, Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University. His expertise is U.S./Iran relations and Iranian cultural, political, and security issues.

Before coming to Hoover, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, in addition to being an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. Milani was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.