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  The Iranian Challenge: An Apocalyptic Religious Zealot Takes on the World

The Iranian Challenge An Apocalyptic Religious Zealot Takes on the World

Part 3: Nuclear secrecy and failed diplomacy

The idea that someone who sees the end of days approaching should gain access to a weapon that could only accelerate this end is intolerable -- despite Ahmadinejad's repeated claims that Iran is pursuing an exclusively peaceful nuclear program designed to serve its energy needs.

Iran has spent the last two decades trying to develop the Bomb, and for the past seven years Iranian scientists have been conducting sporadic experiments -- generally under a cloak of secrecy -- to further that end. On April 9, as the president claims, they managed to successfully enrich uranium to a level necessary to complete the nuclear fuel cycle. Ahmadinejad made this announcement against the backdrop of a mural depicting doves of peace, flanked by the Iranian flag fluttering in the wind and the highest-ranking members of the Mashhad, or Guardians' Council, and the country's top military commanders. Inspectors with the Vienna-based nuclear regulatory agency, the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA), have since secured traces of uranium enriched to much higher degree than would be necessary for the production of nuclear fuel rods. Their results, however, have yet to be confirmed.

The international community's efforts to convince Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment activities have come to a standstill. Despite unanimity within the United Nations Security Council over its demands that Tehran cease such activities, council members Russia and China continue to reject sanctions.

The Western Europeans, who spent three years negotiating -- unsuccessfully -- with Iran over alternatives to uranium enrichment, are currently at a loss. Last week's attempt in London by high-ranking officials from the British, French and German foreign ministries to convince their counterparts in China, Russia and the United States to embark on a joint course of action ended in failure.

"There were two widely divergent positions," one diplomat explains. The Americans insisted that incentives to the Iranians for further negotiation be accompanied by threats. The Chinese and Russians, for their part, oppose this carrot-and-stick approach, leaving it up to the foreign ministers to come up with a workable solution.

The Europeans have urged the Bush administration to agree to concrete concessions and to endorse the delivery of a light-water reactor and Airbus aircraft to Iran, as well as to discontinue their open support for Iranian opposition groups. Most of all, however, they want the Americans to enter into direct talks with Iran's mullahs.

"I don't know if we can truly find a solution with these people," said Bush who, uncharacteristically, is said to have read Ahmadinejad's letter in its entirety. But despite such skepticism, his administration is now taking slightly less of a hard-line approach, apparently in response to fears that excessive stubbornness could jeopardize a carefully assembled anti-Iran coalition. Last week the White House indicated, for the first time, a willingness to consider direct talks, on the condition that Iran first shut down its enrichment program. Meanwhile, Washington has even signaled that a deal similar to that struck with Libya might be possible -- diplomatic relations in return for Iran's giving up its nuclear weapons ambitions. If officials in Tehran and Washington would finally embark on a rational course of action, this could present a viable solution. To that end, the United States would have to tacitly shelve its neoconservative moralism as a geopolitical tool, while Iran's contribution could consist of removing its romantic but apocalyptic notions of the return of the Mahdi from the political arena. A weakened Bush, facing the end of his term, could possibly even be expected to agree to such a compromise. But a triumphant Ahmadinejad, unless forced to do so by other powers within Iran, is seen as less likely to agree.

Can this man be stopped?

To the extent that conditions in Iran are transparent, religious leader Khamenei is probably the only one capable of imposing his authority and reining in Ahmadinejad. One of the group of Tehran intellectuals constantly on the verge of imprisonment even believes that a gesture on the part of the Ayatollah would suffice to relegate the president to the history books from one day to the next. This may be true in theory, but the longer Ahmadinejad is allowed to act out his ambitions on the world stage, the more difficult it will likely be to remove him from circulation without incurring consequences for the overall system.

Meanwhile, tough times have returned for skeptics and opponents of Iran's brand of theocracy. Intellectuals, like philosopher Ramin Jahanbeglu, for example, who had planned to accept an invitation to speak at a conference in Brussels sponsored by the German Marshall Fund, are disappearing into Iran's prisons on charges of maintaining "contact with foreigners" -- code for the crime of espionage.

The Ministry of Information and the government censorship agency recently embarked on a campaign against bloggers who had posted their diaries and political musings on the Internet. Some disappeared into Evin Prison for two or three months and were subsequently released. The government's perfidious treatment of young rebels and intellectuals is consistently the same: they're released from detention, officially given a "vacation," but because their sentences are not revoked they can be arrested immediately the minute they engage in renewed "offences."

Iran's relatively small bourgeoisie has chosen to remove itself from the fray, at least for the time being. This social class, consistently oriented toward the West, feels utterly abandoned -- with no choice but to overcome its dismay over the aggressive tactics of a president who has managed to instill fear in governments worldwide. The election of this apocalyptic religious zealot, which they were powerless to prevent, represents the third major defeat for Iran's educated middle class. "In 1979, the mullahs stole our revolution," says a 42-year-old Iranian documentary filmmaker, "and then we were disappointed by reformer Khatami, and now we have a president who makes even Khomeini seem moderate."

Weighing the options

Instead of confronting Iran head-on, would the West be advised to encourage an internal split, possibly even a counter-revolution? Not according to the director, who believes that a popular uprising is not in the cards for Iran, whose regime opponents, now in their 30s and 40s, can't be compared with the revolutionaries of 1979. "Nowadays we're fighting to pay our rents and our children's tuition," she says.

The documentary filmmaker has no expectations for the younger generation, now in their 20s. "The poor in this country," she says, "are fighting to survive, while the rich are just interested in enjoying themselves."

The poor wage their daily struggle to survive in places like southern Tehran's subway stations, which are so overfilled that many are forced to watch five or six trains go by before a single seat becomes available.

Exiting the overcrowded trains is no less daunting, with knee-high curbs presenting hazardous obstacles. Air pollution has risen to such dangerous levels that schools and government offices are periodically shut down during the winter. The affluent never set foot in the subway, and if their air-conditioned limousines ever head into Tehran's poor south, it's only to reach another destination: Imam Khomeini International, Tehran's gleaming new airport, a spaceship-like glass, chrome and marble monument to the Islamic Republic located in the desert 40 kilometers (25 miles) outside the capital.

The high-tech airport, planned by the Shah almost 30 years ago and recently constructed by the country's mullah regime, has no equal in the Middle East. Planners expect the airport to handle 47 million passengers a year at some point in the future, a number that would place it only 5 million passengers short of Frankfurt Airport's current passenger load.

But today the impressive structure represents little more than the ambitions of a regional power perched on the brink of disaster 27 years after its revolution. Today only about a dozen flights take off from the new airport each day, with only a handful of international airlines offering service to Imam Khomeini. Most are airlines that shuttle Tehran's wealthy to Dubai, which has come to represent both their vacation spot on the Gulf and a refuge should things go wrong in Iran.

Lit by hundreds of floodlights, the empty Imam Khomeini International glows brightly in the desert as the last flight of the evening takes off. But only a few kilometers away, an even brighter glow emanates from the mosque built to enshrine its namesake, a man for whom there was one unmistakable truth: Politics will always be a shadow play, but enlightenment comes from above.

His successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, holds exactly the same view.

DIETER BEDNARZ, RALF BESTE, GEORG MASCOLO, STEFAN SIMONS, GERHARD SPÖRL, BERNHARD ZAND

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan