Dealing with Iran’s Not-So-Irrational Leadership Monthly Review 17/09/08
by Kouross Esmaeli and Ramin Karimian
Nothing expresses the widening gap between the mind frames of the Iranian ruling elite and their Western counterparts more than the headlines in their respective newspapers. The American media, above all, have unilaterally resolved the intelligence questions over Iran’s nuclear program. The New York Times leads the pack with articles and even editorials that assume Iran is building a nuclear bomb.1 The American media, once again, are doing damage control for their President — in this case, for the Bush Administration’s embarrassing Iran policy, especially after the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate’s assessment that Iran abandoned its weapons program in 2003. Western reporting on Iran’s nuclear program is based on the underlying assumption that the Iranians are irrational in their policy-making, therefore Iran is a nation with whom diplomacy is a waste of time. A nuclear Iran has been framed by the Israeli hawks as an “existential threat,” the framing adopted by the American media as well: Iran is a suicide-bombing nation. If allowed to build a nuclear bomb, they will strap it on and destroy Israel even if it means the destruction of their own country and its 70 million inhabitants.2 The logical way to deal with such irrational self-destructive characters is to preempt them by destroying them. This logic looms behind Western news about Iran and remains a possible rationale for a military attack on the country. Read the rest of this entry »