Post-Ahmadinejad Iran: A New Challenge to the West
Shlomi Eldar argues that with the upcoming elections in Iran, the international community should try another, more conciliatory approach.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinehad has just a few months left in office. People in Iran, as well as in the West, are expected to sigh in relief when he finally exits center stage and leaves the presidential office as soon as the elections, scheduled for June 14, 2013, are finally over.
I am well-aware of the attitude that this particular Iranian president was “good for the Jews.” It is an approach that I have even seen expressed on this very website. According to this particular perspective, Ahmadinejad’s fundamentalism and his anti-Semitic comments were a strategic and public relations boon for Israel and its efforts to recruit the international community against Iran’s nuclear program. I dispute that point of view.
Ahmadinejad has placed Iran’s nuclear ambitions at the top of that country’s national agenda. He personally instated the dynamic by which any concession is perceived as an act of surrender and any compromise is seen as a sign of weakness. The situation today is that any candidate who wants to step into the current president’s shoes will have no choice but to play by the same volatile set of rules that Ahmadinejad put in place. In other words, Ahmadinejad placed a loaded nuclear pistol on the desk of the incumbent president and forced him, even before he was elected, to choose between two detrimental alternatives: The future president can move ahead with the nuclear project and bring the wrath of the entire world against him; or he can call a halt to the program and be considered a capitulating coward.
Ahmadinejad is a former student revolutionary who rose through the ranks to attain the highest political office in the Islamic Republic. During his time in office, he set his country on a collision course with the rest of the world. But over time, he lost favor in the eyes of the country’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Khamenei, the one man who confirms the religious eligibility of any candidate who hopes to make an impression in that crowded presidential race. Given the economic sanctions that the West imposed on Iran, the timetables set before it, and President Barack Obama’s “red lines,” there is no doubt that the coming elections will be the most fascinating the country and the world have seen since Khomeini’s revolution in 1979.
