After Muhammad, the founder of Islam, died in 632 A.D. there was a dispute over who should succeed him. The secular leadership (Caliphate) of Islam was given to Muhammad’s father-in-law, although many believed it should have passed to his purportedly chosen successor and son-in-law Ali. Those who chose to follow Ali called themselves Shia Ali – or “Partisans of Ali” – whose shortened form is Shiite.
Ali did in fact become the fourth Caliph, but among Shiites he is considered to be the first Imam or spiritual leader and was believed to be endowed with infallibility. Ali was murdered and thereafter eleven generations of Imams descended from him. Curiously, each of these Imams were also killed either by poison or murder except the 12th. Upon each Imam’s death his role and title passed to his son in hereditary succession. However, the 12th Imam was five years of age when the title passed to him, and while he was not murdered, he did disappear in 872 A.D. Shiites believe he has never died. Since his disappearance, they believe he has been living in the “occultation” – an eschatological belief among Shiites that the 12th Imam will reappear when Allah decides and will come in the form of a messiah-like figure called the Mahdi. Upon his reappearance, the 12th Imam al-Mahdi will rule the world for a certain number of years, during which he will establish Islam as the global religion and restore peace. Jesus will be a subordinate ruler at his side and this will continue until the Judgment Day arrives.
Shiites make up 15% of all Muslims, but 90% of Iranians are Shiite and 80% are Twelvers – i.e. believers in 12th Imam eschatology. Twelvers believe that the 12th Imam currently directs the lives of chosen ones. The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a Twelver as is his mentor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, father of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, was also a Twelver.
When Ahmadinejad spoke before the UN in 2005, shortly after becoming Iran’s president, he ended his address with a prayer calling for the return of the Mahdi – the 12th Imam. In a later meeting with a senior conservative ayatollah, he was filmed speaking about that UN address. That film circulated within Iran as a DVD and was on the Internet where a copy was made and broadcast by the Public Broadcasting System in December 2005. A translation of Ahmadinejad’s remarks reveals his belief that he is one of the chosen ones and thus is being guided by the 12th Imam:
On the last day when I was speaking before the assembly, one of our group told me that when I started to say "In the name of God the almighty and merciful," he saw a light around me, and I was placed inside this aura. I felt it myself.
I felt the atmosphere suddenly change, and for those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink. When I say they didn't bat an eyelid, I'm not exaggerating because I was looking at them. And they were rapt.
It seemed as if a hand was holding them there and had opened their eyes to receive the message from the Islamic republic.
In speeches within Iran since his presidency, Ahmadinejad has said that the main mission of the Islamic Revolution is to pave the way for the reappearance of the 12th Imam, which Twelvers believe will happen in a worldwide apocalypse of catastrophic proportion – i.e. war, economic chaos, and social upheaval. The Twelvers believe that it is their duty to hasten the return of the Mahdi by creating the apocalyptic chaos. This is the prism though which we must listen and understand the rhetoric of Iran’s anti-American and anti-Israel threats.
Throughout the Cold War years, the US and Soviet relied on mutually assured destruction to deter a nuclear war between them. Whichever side launched a nuclear attack could be assured that the other side would get enough nuclear missiles in the air to accomplish mutual destruction. Although Israel has several hundred nuclear missiles that would surely spearhead a retaliatory response to an Iranian nuclear attack, mutually assured destruction does not deter Iran. Its leaders and the proponents of its nuclear weaponry are not intimidated by a nuclear response from Israel or the US because nuclear war would pave the way for the return of the 12th Imam.
Obviously, then, the time to strike Iran is before it is able to retaliate – before it has nuclear weaponry. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, certainly knows that. His Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, has publicly warned that Iran will soon enter a “zone of immunity” in which foreign attack will be futile. Iran is furiously excavating the interior of mountainous over-cover – hardly the act of a nation interested in peaceful uses of nuclear energy as it often claims. “Attacks” by unknown sources have so far relied on computer bugs, explosions, and the assassination of four scientists working in Iran’s nuclear program. These interventions have delayed nuclear progress but not crippled it.
Last week, Netanyahu visited the US to meet with Obama. He no doubt hoped he could persuade the President that further threatening rhetoric by either of them was fruitless. Warnings, sanctions, and diplomacy haven’t worked and aren’t likely to work because Iran’s leaders believe that the American people don’t want another war after Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet without a line in the sand there is nothing that will give the Iranian leadership pause about the risk of continuing their program. When President Bush invaded Iraq and warned them that they were next, Iran suspended their program. This president doesn’t worry them.
But Netanyahu’s hope that meeting with Obama would focus on an honest assessment of the growing threat of a nuclear Iran was delusional. For Obama it was just another whistle stop in his reelection campaign.
The invitation for a White House meeting had been extended a month earlier when representatives of the administration traveled to Israel to discuss Iran and try to persuade Israel from acting unilaterally. When Netanyahu arrived on American soil hoping he could get Obama to ratchet up his resolve, what he found was Obama’s public relations spin machine running wide open. Obama was determined he would not take another drubbing like the one Netanyahu gave him last May. (See my blog Netanyahu Scores; Obama Bombs, May 28, 2011).
Before meeting with Netanyahu, Obama was scheduled to speak to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Therefore in full campaign mode, he invited AIPAC officials to a White House visit before the speech to complain that he wasn’t getting credit for all of the pro-Israel initiatives he’d instigated. Moreover, the White House spin machine had arranged an unprecedented 45-minute meeting for Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine – notably a pro-Democrat journal – to interview the President. Predictably, it consisted mostly of softball questions. Read the interview for yourself. It’s online.
The pressure Obama applied to Netanyahu last May to move back to the 1967 borders cost him Jewish support, and with the election just nine months away, he is scrambling to win back Jewish voters and donors. His comments to the AIPAC audience of 13,000 were intended to show what a friend of Israel he is. Yet as he took the stage, he was initially met with a lukewarm reception by the audience. Among many things, he asserted that as president, “I have provided critical funding to deploy the Iron Dome system that has intercepted rockets that might have hit homes and hospitals and schools [along the Lebanese border.]” This is untrue; Congress funded the Iron Dome system under the leadership of Senator Mark Kirk during the Bush administration.
The Obama speech was filled with the usually-abundant usage of the personal pronoun “I” along with untruths and half-truths. But refuting them one by one is not my aim in this blog. The speech was an appeal to Jewish Americans. Whether Obama succeeded in winning them back depends on his audience’s command of the facts.
The meeting between Obama and Netanyahu followed the Sunday speech – a speech in which Obama made not one laudatory remark about his guest on the following day. Not one. And yet he was effusive in his comments about Shimon Peres who holds the largely ceremonial office of Israel’s President and accompanied the Netanyahu legation
Obama and Netanyahu clearly don’t like each other. An open microphone recently caught Obama’s sentiments in a meeting with France’s President Sarkozy: “I can’t stand Netanyahu,” Sarkozy said, “he’s a liar.” “You’re tired of him,” Obama complained, “what about me? I have to deal with him every day.”
In Jeffrey Goldberg’s well-publicized interview, he asked Obama, “Are you friends? Do you talk about things other than business?” Obama’s response is revealing:
You know, the truth of the matter is, both of us have so much on our plates that there's not always a lot of time to have discussions beyond business. Having said that, what I think is absolutely true is that the prime minister and I come out of different political traditions. This is one of the few times in the history of US-Israeli relations where you have a government from the right in Israel at the same time you have a center-left government in the United States, and so I think what happens then is that a lot of political interpretations of our relationship get projected onto this.
One recent political interpretation didn’t need much interpreting. At a conference last month in Tunis, Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Secretary of State, was asked by a Tunisian student why Obama panders to “Zionist lobbies.” Fair question, she said, and added that during an election season "a lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention." Does that mean politicians lie in order to get votes? Can the pro-Israel proclamations from a politician running for reelection be trusted? And why didn’t Clinton dispute the premise of the student’s question?
In his interview for The Atlantic, Goldberg asked Obama, “Do you think [the Iranian leaders] are messianic? Listen to Obama’s response:
I think it's entirely legitimate to say that this is a regime that does not share our worldview or our values. I do think, and this is what General Dempsey was probably referring to, that as we look at how they operate and the decisions they've made over the past three decades, that they care about the regime's survival. They're sensitive to the opinions of the people and they are troubled by the isolation[sanctions] that they're experiencing.
Does Obama really think a fanatical end-of-the-world eschatology is a worldview? That our differences are just their “values” versus ours? Does he really believe that the Iranian leaders care one whit about the survival of their regime if it brings the return of the 12th Imam? Does he really believe that Iran’s leaders are “sensitive to the opinions of the people” – some of which are dying in their putrid jails? America is confronted with maniacs in Iran and we have a president who is lost in space!
As Netanyahu watches the nuclear clock tick down in Iran, he has to be concerned with how reliable an ally he has in Obama during an election year – or afterward, for that matter. Since Obama needs the Jewish vote he can say things like "There should not be a shred of doubt by now: When the chips are down, I have Israel's back," as he did in his AIPAC speech. Will a reelected Obama make the same assertion?
If Israel doubts that Obama will take the tacitly promised military action when sanctions and diplomacy fail – and they will surely fail – Israeli leaders have two options. They can accept a nuclear Iran, which means other countries in the Middle East will also “go nuclear” and that would likely be the end of Israel in the neighborhood. Or Israel could go it alone and strike as it did against Iraq and Syria. Regardless of the success of an Iranian attack, it would roil the Middle East and spike gas prices – not good for an incumbent in an election year.
If Israel goes it alone, Obama is caught in a bind. In his AIPAC speech he acknowledged Israel’s right to defend itself. He could hardly then take a stand against Israel’s actions, and he would be hard-pressed to deny help to Israel if he was asked. Yet he would not give Netanyahu the “red line” he wanted – i.e. a clear set of conditions that Iran could not misinterpret as the military option trigger. After all, it’s an election year and Team Obama seems more focused on deterring Israel than stopping Iran’s march toward a nuclear bomb. That message should have been loud and clear to Netanyahu. I think it was.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Eyal Gabbai, the former director general of the Israeli Prime Minister's office, said Netanyahu's meeting with Obama "will be the last time they can speak face-to-face before a decision is taken.” What does that mean?
Is Israel poised to strike? Would it strike only nuclear weapon facilities, some of which are target-hardened? Would it target Iran’s unprotected electrical grid and infrastructure, paralyzing its economy? Both?
If Israel were to succeed in destroying critical weapon-making assets, they would be rebuilt. No doubt Russia and China would help in the effort. Even if Iran’s program is set back for years, it won’t be set back permanently. The only thing that would bring about a permanent solution is regime change.
Moreover, there are an estimated 200,000 missiles in the countries surrounding Israel – in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran and those in the hands of Hamas in Gaza. An attack on Iran would surely bring those missiles raining down on Israel. The war would therefore widen to include those countries. China and Russia would at least be Iran’s allies in the conflagration as arms suppliers. The US could not sit on the sidelines when its only ally in the Middle East is under such an attack.
Given the risk of counter-attack and understanding Iran’s apocalyptic 12th Imam theology, why would Israel limit its objective to disabling nuclear facilities when regime change is the only permanent solution – assuming there is a solution short of mutually assured destruction? Israel’s destruction is virtually assured if Iran gets a bomb. Why would the Israeli leaders wait on a dithering president in a reelection campaign whose loyalty to the historic relationship between our two countries is suspect?
What Obama succeeded in accomplishing in his meeting with Netanyahu last week was to convince the Prime Minister that whatever America’s ally in the Middle East decides to do, Obama will know nothing about it until it’s underway.
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