p.m. carpenter - A Colossal Swindle

p m carpenter's commentary

September 24, 2007
Demonizing the inconsequential: The happy hysteria of Monster-Making 101
Now this is startling -- assuming you haven't picked up a paper in the last six years or so: "Political analysts [in Iran] say they are surprised at the degree to which the West focuses on their president, saying that it reflects a general misunderstanding of their system."

It's only natural that the Bush administration should misunderstand. It's what it does. And if no troubling misunderstanding exists, it creates one, just to keep the dogs of war and distraction hungry. But if you caught that embarrassing "60 Minutes" interview with Majmoud Ahmadinejad last night, in which Iran's faltering president was treated with all the gravity of a virtual dictator, then you know the Bush administration isn't alone in fomenting misunderstandings. It can always count on assorted elements of the equally unschooled media.

Ahmadinejad is good copy, as the expression goes, mostly by virtue of having a big mouth. He's also the perfect and easily digested foil to our mountainous misunderstandings in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. And what a perfect face for a U.S. poster boy of unctuous evil -- one that slyly grins as it surely plots its nefarious schemes of global disorder and regional domination. It's always nice to put a face on these things, unless, of course, we don't know where the face is and can't find it.

But we know precisely where Ahmadinejad is and precisely what he's doing; or, perhaps, we have that muddled. No matter. For it may even be that we know precisely what we're doing in misunderstanding what Ahmadinejad is doing and can do, because clarity is the enemy of misunderstandings and all the happy military-industrial complexities that come with them. Better to leave things murky, and dark. They seem so much more intriguingly nefarious that way.

We're doing a bang-up job. For as Iranian insiders say of what's happening on the inside: "In demonizing [their] president ... the West has served him well, elevating his status at home and in the region at a time when he is increasingly isolated politically because of his go-it-alone style and ineffective economic policies."

"He's not that consequential," says one Iranian political scientist, who just previous to that comment nevertheless outlined the origins of his president's expanding consequence: "The United States pays too much attention to Ahmadinejad."

Of course it does. How, after all, can we have an inconsequential clown as the face of so many troubles?

Yet as his power and influence in Iran decline; as his economy tanks; as his political allies flee him (one former supporter's depth of support was reflected in merely having "liked [his] slogans demanding justice"); as some of his ministers walk out; as his head of the central bank resigns in disgust; as his judiciary takes potshots at him; as Iran's powerfully "entrenched interests" grow more disgruntled with his domestic misrule -- in the face of all this, Ahmadinejad's importance grows largely because of the "international condemnation he manages to generate when he speaks up."

Such condemnation feeds Iran's real power -- Ayatollah Khamenei and his fellow reactionaries -- rooted in a paranoid ideology: "Mr. Ahmadinejad’s power stems not from his office per se, but from the refusal of his patron[s] ... to move beyond Iran’s revolutionary identity, which makes full relations with the West impossible."

On the other hand, if we were so foolish as to show an interest in fomenting full and productive relations, we'd then be stuck without an enemy. There's always China, I suppose, but it's busily engaged in manufacturing our lethal toys, so best leave it for another day. Ahmadinejad is perfect for now.