Faith-Based Realpolitik

Notwithstanding that it is arguably one of the strangest documents in the annals of modern diplomacy, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent 18-page letter to President George W. Bush was greeted in some quarters with sentiments bordering upon rapture.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared the missive an “opening” to which the Bush administration should respond with “direct talks.” Gary Sick, a professor of Middle East politics at Columbia University in New York, agreed, opining that the letter probably represented Iranian interest in opening a channel of communication, a view seconded by Paul Pillar of Georgetown University, who served until last year as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Pillar told The Washington Post, “there is no question in my mind that there has been for some time a desire on the part of the senior Iranian leadership to engage in a dialogue with the United States.”

Albeit in a more restrained tone than that taken by the enthusiasts and with the wise condition that Tehran must first suspend its uranium activities, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice announced last week that the Bush administration will join in European negotiations with Iran – a notable departure from longstanding U.S. opposition to direct high-level diplomatic contacts with the a regime that has been accused of state sponsorship of terrorism.

Maybe the advocates for direct talks with Iran are right. Maybe one can look beyond the preachy tone of Ahmadinejad's letter which summoned “prophet Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, Joseph and Jesus Christ (PBUH)” to judge the United States. Maybe one should even gloss over the author's obstinate refusal to acknowledge the slaughter of six million Jews in Shoah. Maybe, “engagement” will transform Ahmadinejad and the mullahs behind him into responsible international citizens. Maybe, just maybe, the possession of the nuclear weapons the Islamic Republic insists it is not seeking might somehow instill its regime with the same rational calculus – the one ironically dubbed MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) – that conditioned Soviet-American relations during the Cold War. In short, maybe one should ignore the predominantly religious tone of the letter.

Maybe … But I would not count on it. The problem with these interpretations – and, in point of fact, with much of our contemporary foreign policy analysts who make them – is their general disregard for even the possibility that religious beliefs and institutions, no matter how alien to our own postmodern Western existences, still plays an incredibly significant role in the lives of many individuals and societies around the globe. One cannot help but wonder sometimes if our “wise men” were collectively trying to make the Enlightenment conceit about the mutual exclusivity of human progress and religious faith true by sheer force of willing it to be so.

In fact, insofar as objective analysis of the real world goes, ignoring religion or reducing it to its utilitarian aspects is a cardinal sin that is repeatedly committed not only by journalists scrambling to meet deadlines and politicians search of a quotable, but inoffensive, sound-bytes, but also by diplomats and scholars whose job it is to know better.

Nor is the religious dimension a matter of conceptual nuance bereft of practical import to statecraft and best left to theologians. To cite an example a rather removed from the invidious polemics surrounding the Middle East, as I documented in my book on state failure in Liberia, when I was serving as a diplomat several years ago in the then war torn West African country, I discovered that a critical element of then President Charles Taylor's popular influence with the masses could be found in his use of religion as a source the source par excellence of his legitimacy for his thuggish regime. In fact, two titles that appeared before the warlord's name on all government documents: “Dakhpannah” and “(Reverend) Doctor,” which asserted his claims to be both the country's “supreme zo (witch doctor)” as well as a Christian leader. Weren't the two roles mutually exclusive? Most assuredly, even though what really mattered was not religious consistency – much less theological orthodoxy – but rather the fact that for Taylor it worked.

And the Greater Middle East, where the America's war on terrorism – as well as its standoff with the nuclear ambitions of Iran – is being largely played out, the same dynamic is at work with powerful transnational religious currents operating quite effectively below the radar screens of most conventional diplomatic and security analysis, which latter generally confines itself to a sort of materialistic determinism that slights non-material factors. These currents – unlike political dilemmas that might be remedied by governmental action, security challenges that might be met by appropriate force, or socio-economic difficulties that might respond to the appropriate stimuli – are, as Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it succinctly a few years ago, “an intractable force that can be quite unresponsive to all the normal instrumentalities of state power, let alone the instrumentalities of foreign policy.”

This brings us full-circle back to the letter-writing Iranian president. Maybe Ahmadinejad is just being histrionic, trying to pump up his domestic standing by emulating the letters that Muhammad once sent to the rulers of the empires surrounding Arabia demanding their conversion. But it is just as likely the man truly meant it when he urged President Bush to “accept this invitation” to make “a genuine return to the teachings of the prophets” by which Ahmadinejad means conversion to Islam. And, it is rather unlikely that the President will accommodate him on this point, Ahmadinejad would have done his duty under the religious principle of mahdaviat, the belief in and efforts to prepare for the return of the Mahdi, the “divinely guided one,” for whom the Shi'a have awaited since the Twelfth Imam disappeared in 874.

In fact, taken as a whole, Ahmadinejad's actions ominously indicate his adherence to a very radical strain of the messianic Shi'a creed, which aims to hasten the Mahdi's appearance. As mayor of Tehran in 2004, Ahmadinejad demolished homes and businesses to build a grand avenue to facilitate the Mahdi's return trip. A year later, freshly elected to the presidency, he went to Jamkaran, south of the capital, where a shrine houses a well where the Twelfth Imam is believed to have hidden himself. At the well, the president-elect dropped in a list of his proposed cabinet members to see if the Mahdi had any objections (none were reported, although perhaps the president's gift of $17 million to gild his sanctuary assuaged any concerns on the part of the long lost Imam).

Showing up at the UN General Assembly last year, the Iranian leader decided to address the deity, rather than the assembled diplomats: “O mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace!” Back at home, as Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor reported earlier this year, Ahmadinejad finances an outfit called the Bright Future Institute (the eighth of its kind!) dedicated to preparing the ground for the Twelfth Imam's immanent return – and the global battle between good and evil that it will usher in.

And why keep this “good” news to yourself? While they have long financed Palestinian terrorist groups, it was only this past March that the Iranians opened up their first official office in the West Bank, the Ramallah-based “Shi'a Council in Palestine,” to spread Iranian-style ideas among the Palestinian population. According to the director of the new bureau, Muhammad Gawanmeh, an Islamic Jihad activist who has spent time in Israeli prisons for violence, the office seeks to inform Palestinians of the “coming reappearance of the Imam Mahdi, may Allah hasten his reappearance, who will lead the forces of righteousness against the forces of evil in a final, apocalyptic world battle.”

The point is that all of this surreal preoccupation with the end times has a direct impact on the course of real-world events and, consequently, the eventualities that one must plan for. In the case of Iran, by all means every possibility for peacefully resolving the crisis should be exhausted. But Realpolitik necessarily entails an accurate assessment of your counterpart's motivations and objectives. And it might just be that someone who really believes he can hasten the return of the Promised One to defeat his enemies isn't particularly interested in compromises with the “Great Satan,” but rather will hole out the prospect of a negotiated outcome to buy the time needed to finish the weapons that will precipitate the final, Mahdi-led battle. Failure to acknowledge this very real possibility renders an analyst as much a fundamentalist trapped by ideological blinders – albeit of an entirely different variety – as someone sitting around a well waiting for the a mythical figure to emerge after nearly eleven centuries.

From Bali to Baghdad to Bamako, “faith-based” ideas – no matter how apparently irrational, no matter how much they may upset religious or secular orthodoxies – are a very real force to be reckoned with. Realism requires that we adapt our political interests and security doctrines to take into account the real-life consequences of religious aspirations, both for good and for ill.

— J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is also an academic fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.