Iran's Most WantedAhmadinejad's choice for defense minister is sought by Interpol for planning the bombing of an Argentine synagogue.
Posted Monday, Aug. 24, 2009, at 2:01 PM ET
President Obama has said that he wants "the Islamic Republic of Iran" to be welcomed back into the "community of nations." Unfortunately, it is precisely the fact that it is an Islamic republic that excludes it from such consideration. A pointed reminder of this was provided last week, when the country's dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, freshly blooded from his recent military coup, nominated his choice of defense minister. This turns out to be Ahmad Vahidi, who if confirmed will be the only holder of the defense portfolio in the world to be simultaneously wanted by Interpol.
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StumbleUponVahidi used to head the so-called "Quds Force," a shadowy arm of the "Revolutionary Guards" that conducts covert operations overseas. In 1994, according to an Argentine indictment adopted by Interpol's "red list" or "most wanted" index, he was one of those responsible for "conceiving, planning, financing and executing" the demolition of the Jewish community's cultural center in Buenos Aires. There were 85 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Among the five other named co-conspirators in this atrocity were Mohsen Rezaee, formerly the head of the Revolutionary Guards and more recently a candidate for the presidency, and the late Imad Mugniyeh, the Damascus-based leader of Hezbollah's military wing, itself a declared proxy of the Islamic Republic.
At the time, Interpol's Secretary-General Ronald K. Noble said that "a red notice chills travel—limits travel—and places the government in power at risk of explaining why a person for whom a red notice is issued is able to move freely." A different version of this very point occurred with particular force to Canada's foreign minister in 2006. His office noticed that a certain Saeed Mortazavi was scheduled to travel from Iran, via Frankfurt, to Geneva. Mortazavi was then and still is Tehran's much-detested and feared prosecutor-general, in which capacity he oversaw the rape and murder of a Canadian citizen, a photojournalist named Zahra Kazemi, in 2003. He had also freed her rapists and murderers after two independent commissions had found them responsible. (Need I add that Mortazavi was en route to Geneva as a member of Iran's official delegation to the Human Rights Council?) Foreign Minister Peter MacKay telephoned his counterparts to try to have Mortazavi arrested and extradited to Canada, but he wasn't quite quick enough.
There's really quite an impressive backlog of cases to be considered. In 1997, a court in Germany found that the shooting of several Iranian Kurds at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin in 1992 had been sanctioned and ordered by an Iranian government committee that included "Supreme Leader" Ali Khamenei and then-President Rafsanjani. This would not be the first time that a criminal investigation has touched the men who stand at the head of the Iranian state: Mark Bowden has produced some persuasive if not conclusive testimony that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was among the hostage-takers and kidnappers who violated diplomatic immunity at the American Embassy in Tehran, and there are legislators in the Austrian Parliament who have demanded an inquiry into his role as a Revolutionary Guard leader in furnishing the weapons and money that were employed by an Iranian death squad to murder Iranian Kurdish leader Abdul-Rahman Ghassemlou in Vienna in 1989.
The term Revolutionary Guard was not, until recently, as much of a byword as it has since become. But this year's military coup in Tehran, of which that organization was the main engine, has put it at the forefront of our attention. The rape and torture of young Iranians, the sadistic public bullying and sometimes murder of women, the closing of newspapers and the framing-up in a show trial of opposition politicians and intellectuals—all this is the fruit of "Revolutionary Guard" activity and ambition. We may be limited in what we can do to help and defend the Iranians who are confined within their own borders. But surely it is time that the international community spoke with one voice and said that the leaders of this criminal gang must stay inside their own borders as well. Perhaps fewer invitations to "President" Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia University and perhaps fewer countries putting out the red carpet for his defense minister. As for the sending of known supervisors of murder and torture to human rights summits in Geneva: Conceivably that could become a slight no-no as well. Some of these people have bank accounts overseas, in consequence of their years of fleecing the helpless and torpid Iranian economy: Freeze these accounts or confiscate them and hold them in escrow for the day when democracy comes.
Somewhere hiding in Iran are people who were paid by its government to commit sectarian murders in Lebanon and Iraq, and who organized and carried out assassinations and assassination attempts against the editors and publishers of Salman Rushdie, a novelist then living in London. Everybody can now see that the Iranian government has forfeited any claim to legitimacy at home. Of scarcely less importance is the fact that it presents the face of a criminal enterprise to the outside world as well. There is no family of nations, except in the colloquial sense of "crime family," to which it can conceivably be invited to belong. We should ground its leaders for a start, demand the extradition of their many wanted accomplices, and exact hefty penalties from their overseas proxy organizations. The week in which the Obama administration was so voluble about the British humiliation at the hands of Libya's Col. Gadafi is an excellent moment to recall our own responsibilities in this regard, including our duty to our Canadian neighbors. But remember: Gadafi after the fall of Baghdad at least decided to surrender his nuclear materials. In the case of Iran, it won't be very long before the theocratic thugs and crooks and assassins have their very own fissile and missile capacity. Please bear it in mind, as they so obviously do.
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I have no trouble stipulating the entirely proper moral repugnance that the alumni and current members of the Revolutionary Guards have earned. But it is also seems to me that the simplicity and clarity of the case for punishment made by Hitchens is only apparent, and the case really is contingent on Iran's relative weakness.
By which I mean that when the Soviet Union was our central foreign policy problem, the even clearer moral case for muscular rejection of tainted officialdom from international forums was clearly and necessarily trumped by pragmatic considerations of coexistence when the alternative did not bear contemplation.
Here we had a state structured as a prison, with ruling structures liberally sprinkled with thugs who make Ahmadinejad's cronies look gentle, overseen by the largest secret police force the world has ever seen, operating above the law with impunity at home and directing outrages abroad far in excess of anything the Iranians have attempted. And did we arrest those officials at airports, or ban "diplomats" with blood on their hands from International conferences, or give the erstwhile chairman of the KGB Yuri Andropov the Kurt Waldheim-style ostracism his conduct in his previous office had so richly deserved, after he ascended to Party Chairman? No, of course not. There would have been no point in any such measures, assuming we wished to not court global nuclear annihilation. We had to make deals with murderers. It sucked, it felt dirty, but the alternative was worse. In the long run we can see that the patient long game was the correct choice.
I like moral clarity as well as the next guy, but as the example of the USSR illustrates, the world doesn't often supply as much of it as we would like. Obviously Iran is not the USSR, and its weakness relative to the USSR gives more scope for indulging in moral outrage in policymaking towards Iran. But while the tone of this article -- essentially that the moral argument necessarily trumps any pragmatic considerations of diplomacy -- may be rhetorically satisfying as rants can be, this intellectual stance is half-blind. We aren't going to "free" Iran, any more than we "freed" the Soviet Union (Reagan-worshiping wingnuts to the contrary). Only Iranians can do that. Our Long Game should seek to bring that outcome about (and "success" may merely mean a kinder, gentler "Islamic Republic", if that should suit them). Policy driven by moral outrage, unbalanced by considerations of pragmatic interest, strike me as unlikely to bring about that consummation, as devoutly as we may wish for it.
-- Carlo Graziani
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