History Forum / General / British History / March 2006

Wall Street Journal
March 29, 2006
Pg. 18

'The Last Helicopter'

By Amir Taheri

Hassan Abbasi has a dream -- a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies
to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the
"fleeing Americans," forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by
"the Army of Muhammad." Presented by his friends as "The Dr. Kissinger of
Islam," Mr. Abbasi is "professor of strategy" at the Islamic Republic's
Revolutionary Guard Corps University and, according to Tehran sources, the
principal foreign policy voice in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new
radical administration.

For the past several weeks Mr. Abbasi has been addressing crowds of Guard
and Baseej Mustadafin (Mobilization of the Dispossessed) officers in Tehran
with a simple theme: The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long conflict
and will soon revert to its traditional policy of "running away," leaving
Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed the whole of the Middle East, to be reshaped by
Iran and its regional allies.

To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be
narrated with the help of the image of "the last helicopter." It was that
image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy
Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind
the charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the
helicopters carried the bodies of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a
Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter
flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard,
leaving behind Saddam Hussein's generals, who could not believe why they had
been allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day.
Bill Clinton's helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and
delivering 16 American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.

According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an "aberration," a
leader out of sync with his nation's character and no more than a brief
nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an "American Middle East."
Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no
helicopter as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe
that whoever succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the
helicopter image to extricate the U.S. from a complex situation that few
Americans appear to understand.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's defiant rhetoric is based on a strategy known in Middle
Eastern capitals as "waiting Bush out." "We are sure the U.S. will return to
saner policies," says Manuchehr Motakki, Iran's new Foreign Minister.

Mr. Ahmadinejad believes that the world is heading for a clash of
civilizations with the Middle East as the main battlefield. In that clash
Iran will lead the Muslim world against the "Crusader-Zionist camp" led by
America. Mr. Bush might have led the U.S. into "a brief moment of triumph."
But the U.S. is a "sunset" (ofuli) power while Iran is a sunrise (tolu'ee)
one and, once Mr. Bush is gone, a future president would admit defeat and
order a retreat as all of Mr. Bush's predecessors have done since Jimmy
Carter.

Mr. Ahmadinejad also notes that Iran has just "reached the Mediterranean"
thanks to its strong presence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian
territories. He used that message to convince Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad to adopt a defiant position vis-à-vis the U.N. investigation of the
murder of Rafiq Hariri, a former prime minister of Lebanon. His argument was
that once Mr. Bush is gone, the U.N., too, will revert to its traditional
lethargy. "They can pass resolutions until they are blue in the face," Mr.
Ahmadinejad told a gathering of Hezbollah, Hamas and other radical Arab
leaders in Tehran last month.

According to sources in Tehran and Damascus, Mr. Assad had pondered the
option of "doing a Gadhafi" by toning down his regime's anti-American
posture. Since last February, however, he has revived Syria's militant
rhetoric and dismissed those who advocated a rapprochement with Washington.
Iran has rewarded him with a set of cut-price oil, soft loans and grants
totaling $1.2 billion. In response Syria has increased its support for
terrorists going to fight in Iraq and revived its network of agents in
Lebanon, in a bid to frustrate that country's democratic ambitions.

It is not only in Tehran and Damascus that the game of "waiting Bush out" is
played with determination. In recent visits to several regional capitals,
this writer was struck by the popularity of this new game from Islamabad to
Rabat. The general assumption is that Mr. Bush's plan to help democratize
the heartland of Islam is fading under an avalanche of partisan attacks
inside the U.S. The effect of this assumption can be witnessed everywhere.

In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf has shelved his plan, forged under pressure
from Washington, to foster a popular front to fight terrorism by lifting
restrictions against the country's major political parties and allowing
their exiled leaders to return. There is every indication that next year's
elections will be choreographed to prevent the emergence of an effective
opposition. In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, arguably the most pro-American
leader in the region, is cautiously shaping his post-Bush strategy by
courting Tehran and playing the Pushtun ethnic card against his rivals.

In Turkey, the "moderate" Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is
slowly but surely putting the democratization process into reverse gear.
With the post-Bush era in mind, Mr. Erdogan has started a purge of the
judiciary and a transfer of religious endowments to sections of the private
sector controlled by his party's supporters. There are fears that next
year's general election would not take place on a level playing field.

Even in Iraq the sentiment that the U.S. will not remain as committed as it
has been under Mr. Bush is producing strange results. While Shiite
politicians are rushing to Tehran to seek a reinsurance policy, some Sunni
leaders are having second thoughts about their decision to join the
democratization process. "What happens after Bush?" demands Salih al-Mutlak,
a rising star of Iraqi Sunni leaders. The Iraqi Kurds have clearly decided
to slow down all measures that would bind them closer to the Iraqi state.
Again, they claim that they have to "take precautions in case the Americans
run away."

There are more signs that the initial excitement created by Mr. Bush's
democratization project may be on the wane. Saudi Arabia has put its
national dialogue program on hold and has decided to focus on economic
rather than political reform. In Bahrain, too, the political reform machine
has been put into rear-gear, while in Qatar all talk of a new democratic
constitution to set up a constitutional monarchy has subsided. In Jordan the
security services are making a spectacular comeback, putting an end to a
brief moment of hopes for reform. As for Egypt, Hosni Mubarak has decided to
indefinitely postpone local elections, a clear sign that the Bush-inspired
scenario is in trouble. Tunisia and Morocco, too, have joined the game by
stopping much-advertised reform projects while Islamist radicals are
regrouping and testing the waters at all levels.

But how valid is the assumption that Mr. Bush is an aberration and that his
successor will "run away"? It was to find answers that this writer spent
several days in the U.S., especially Washington and New York, meeting
ordinary Americans and senior leaders, including potential presidential
candidates from both parties. While Mr. Bush's approval ratings, now in free
fall, and the increasingly bitter American debate on Iraq may lend some
credence to the "helicopter" theory, I found no evidence that anyone in the
American leadership elite supported a cut-and-run strategy.

The reason was that almost all realized that the 9/11 attacks have changed
the way most Americans see the world and their own place in it. Running away
from Saigon, the Iranian desert, Beirut, Safwan and Mogadishu was not hard
to sell to the average American, because he was sure that the story would
end there; the enemies left behind would not pursue their campaign within
the U.S. itself. The enemies that America is now facing in the jihadist
archipelago, however, are dedicated to the destruction of the U.S. as the
world knows it today.

Those who have based their strategy on waiting Mr. Bush out may find to
their cost that they have, once again, misread not only American politics
but the realities of a world far more complex than it was even a decade ago.
Mr. Bush may be a uniquely decisive, some might say reckless, leader. But a
visitor to the U.S. soon finds out that he represents the American mood much
more than the polls suggest.

Mr. Taheri is author of "L'Irak: Le Dessous Des Cartes" (Editions Complexe,
2002).

Do we have the spine? Time will tell. -the Troll