What I found particularly interesting was the attention that the series gave to the parallel surge in interest in eschatology among Muslims and evangelical Christians, though it also noted the numerous and profound theological differences between the two.
“The apocalypse is a deep belief among humans regarding the end of the world,” said the program’s narrator. “One of the characteristics of the West in the current era is obsession with the end of time. Experts say discussions about the savior and the ‘end of time’ have not been so prevalent before as they are now in the West. . . . They [evangelicals] believe the Messiah [Jesus] will reappear and will establish his global rule with its center in [Jerusalem], with the help of born-again Christians. This sect’s religious leaders in the 1990s strongly propagated their beliefs in the U.S. and European societies. In the past two years dozens of books have been published in this field. . . . These extremist Christians believe that certain events must be carried out by the Protestants in the world so as to prepare the grounds for the Messiah’s reappearance. The followers of this school believe they have a religious duty to accelerate these events, for example planting the illegal Zionist state of Israel for the Jews of the world, in Palestine.”332
The program and its accompanying Web site even went so far as to suggest that the Mahdi might come to earth in 2007 and could be revealed to the world as early as the spring equinox.
That, of course, did not happen.
“Imminent”
Not all Muslims—nor even all Shias—share the brand of eschatology I have just outlined. Even Shias who do believe what Ahmadinejad believes are not all convinced that such events are going to happen in their lifetime, much less soon. Indeed, many Iranians are horrified by what Ahmadinejad has been saying and doing. But the point is that Ahmadinejad and his close aides and advisors are driven by the deeply rooted belief that the Islamic messiah will appear soon and that by launching a war to annihilate Judeo-Christian civilization, they can hasten that day. So is the Supreme Leader Khamenei.
Hasten is a key word here. Ahmadinejad and his team do not believe they are supposed to be sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the Mahdi. They believe they have been given specific tasks to speed up his arrival, and they are determined to accomplish those tasks, whatever the cost to themselves or their country. “The Hidden Imam has no tangible presence among us, but he is always [here], and we must prepare the ground for his speedy appearance,” Ahmadinejad said at a 2006 eschatology conference on the occasion of the Mahdi’s birthday. “We must rush towards him and hasten to prepare the ground for his appearance. [He will not appear] if we sit idly. Mankind must hurry towards the Hidden Imam in order to reach him”333 (emphasis added).
Soon is another key word. Western leaders may not notice or care, but Ahmadinejad has operated in office as if the clock were ticking and time running out. As I noted earlier, shortly after his election in June 2005, Ahmadinejad began telling colleagues that the end of the world was just two or three years away. It was significant, therefore, that two years later he gave a speech to the International Seminar on the Doctrine of Mahdism in Tehran in which he warned that the West’s day was almost finished. On August 25, 2007, Ahmadinejad said, “Our enemies naturally feel threatened by the call to [believe in] the Mahdi, for they do not want people to think about justice. But our reply to them is that the era of the aggressive has come to an end. We believe that it is time for the righteous to rule.” Then he added that the preparations for the Hidden Imam “will soon be complete.”334
A few days later, on August 28, Ahmadinejad said that “the current problems faced by the world result from [the rule] of unworthy rulers” and that “the ultimate solution is to replace these unworthy regimes and rulers, and to establish the rule of the Hidden Imam.” He then reemphasized that the Mahdi’s return “is imminent.”335
On August 29, he said, “The Iranian nation and the Islamic Revolution have a pivotal role in preparing the ground for the coming of the Hidden Imam. . . . We must rapidly develop Iran in order to create the [right] conditions for his coming, and we must also help the rest of the world’s nations [to prepare for his return], in order to precipitate this great event. . . . The responsibility that currently rests on Iran’s [shoulders] is very heavy; it is the kind of mission [with which] the divine prophets [were entrusted]. It does not permit us to rest or slumber even for a moment. Have you ever seen a prophet take a rest from the fulfillment of his mission?”336 (emphasis added).
A few weeks later, during his third visit to the U.S., rather than close his speech before the U.N. General Assembly with a prayer for Allah to bring the Mahdi quickly as he had on his two previous visits, Ahmadinejad chose to begin his speech with prayer. “O God,” he prayed before hundreds of world leaders, “hasten the arrival of Imam al-Mahdi and grant him good health and victory and make us his followers and those to attest to his rightfulness.”337
Ideas Have Consequences: Creating Chaos in Iraq
If all this were just talk, that would be one thing. But ideas have consequences. Ahmadinejad’s religious beliefs have driven Iranian policy in a variety of significant areas. In this section and the next, I will note two of the most important.
The first was Iran’s policy toward Iraq following the U.S. and Coalition effort to liberate the country from Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror. Some American politicians have suggested that Tehran has a real and vital interest in helping create a calm and peaceful Iraq, even if they are not happy with efforts to create a pro-Western democracy there. Such leaders have, therefore, strenuously advocated that the U.S. enter into direct negotiations with Ahmadinejad’s regime to find ways to end the sectarian violence throughout Mesopotamia.
In their Iraq Study Group Report released in 2006, for example, former secretary of state James A. Baker III, former House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Lee Hamilton, and a distinguished group of foreign policy veterans argued the following: “The United States must build a new international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region. In order to foster such consensus, the United States should embark on a robust diplomatic effort to establish an international support structure intended to stabilize Iraq . . . including all of Iraq’s neighbors—Iran and Syria among them. Despite the well-known differences between many of these countries, they all share an interest in avoiding the horrific consequences that would flow from a chaotic Iraq, particularly a humanitarian catastrophe and regional destabilization.”338
At first glance, such analysis looks good, particularly coming from such eminently qualified experts. But look at it again through the lens of Shia eschatology. Are leaders who feel called by Allah to create chaos, carnage, and confusion throughout the Middle East likely to feel it is in their strategic national interest to ameliorate the “horrific consequences” of war and insurgency? Moreover, are leaders who believe the Mahdi will soon establish Sharia law in Iraq and set up the seat of a global Islamic government there likely to believe that it is in their best interest to help the Americans, the British, the French, and other Judeo-Christian powers establish freedom and democracy in Iraq? Or over time are they more likely to send terrorists, money, and weapons into Iraq to kill Americans, Coalition forces, and Iraqis; destroy infrastructure; disrupt the economy; hinder the flow of oil and gas coming from Iraq; and generally make life miserable for everyone in the country?
In 2005, Iran poured an estimated $1 billion into activities aimed at interfering with Iraqi internal affairs.339 By mid-2006, 80 percent of foreign insurgents being arrested in Iraq (1,577 out of 1,972) had come from Iran.340 In June of 2006, former Iranian president Rafsanjani said bluntly, “If Iran and Iraq become united, the enemies will not be able to force anything against Islam in the region.”341 By May of 2007, an estimated 70 percent of foreign insurgents were still coming from Shia Gulf states, including Iran.342 That summer, as he was claiming the Mahdi’s arrival was “imminent,” Ahmadinejad was also tipping his hand regarding Iran’s as
pirations, telling reporters, “The political power of the occupiers [U.S. and Coalition forces in Iraq] is collapsing rapidly. Soon, we will see a huge power vacuum in the region. . . . We are prepared to fill the gap.”343
In April of 2008, Iraqi security forces uncovered the largest cache of Iranian weapons to date, including more than a thousand roadside-bomb components, more than three thousand pounds of explosives, and forty-five Katusha rockets, along with scores of rounds of ammunition, mortars, and mortar stands.344 Not surprisingly, that same month, General David Petraeus testified on Capitol Hill that Iranian-backed terrorist groups such as the Mahdi Army—run by Iraqi Shia firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr—posed the “greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq.”345 The following month, CIA director Michael Hayden said point-blank, “It is my opinion [that] it is the policy of the Iranian government, approved to highest level of that government, to facilitate the killing of Americans in Iraq. Just make sure there’s clarity on that.”346
It should be noted here that in mid-2008, Tehran began to call off the Mahdi Army and stopped sending as much support to the Shia insurgents. As a result, violence in Iraq dropped dramatically. But I believe Ahmadinejad and his advisors made a tactical decision to calm things down in Iraq. It was not that they agreed with the Baker-Hamilton Commission and thought, “Oh my goodness, violence on our borders and chaos in Baghdad is a bad thing.” To the contrary, the Iranian leaders hate the Iraqis. They feel Arabs are ethnically, racially, and morally beneath Persians. They want revenge for Saddam’s invasion of Iran in 1980 and the horrors of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. More to the point, strategically they want to create the conditions in Iraq that will hasten the coming of the Mahdi, and they saw that the chaos they were producing was very effective. But tactically they faced a question: would it not be more effective to inflict more carnage in Iraq after U.S. and coalition forces had left the region? Of course it would. What, then, would be the best way to get U.S. and coalition forces out of Iraq as fast as possible? Simple—let Washington feel as if the war had been won.
That required ratcheting down the violence, and quickly. Less violence in Iraq, the leadership in Tehran hoped, might help the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, who was advocating a speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops.347 It might also hurt the campaign of John McCain by providing less of a felt need for Americans to elect a war hero and experienced veteran to the role of Commander in Chief. Furthermore, less violence in Iraq would give Congress and the Bush administration a reason to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq as quickly as possible, which is what all the polls of American public opinion indicated the country wanted.
But make no mistake: this was a tactical decision. If Iran is not dealt with—and if Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and leaders who hold similar theological views remain in power—Tehran will eventually do everything it possibly can to make Iraq hell on earth in order to create the conditions for the coming of the Mahdi.
Ideas Have Consequences: Acquiring Nuclear Weapons
The second major policy arena driven by Shia eschatology is Iran’s feverish desire to build, buy, or steal nuclear weapons.
In December 2007, a ferocious international debate erupted over just how soon Iran would be able to go nuclear against Israel or any other country. The debate was triggered by the release of an American document known as the “National Intelligence Assessment,” or NIE. Written in cooperation with sixteen U.S. spy agencies, the NIE suggested that the U.S. had hard evidence that Iran halted its program to develop nuclear weapons back in 2003.
“Tehran is most likely keeping its options open with respect to building a weapon,” reported the International Herald Tribune, drawing upon the unclassified version of the report, but intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons. . . . Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium . . . a program that the Tehran government has said is designed for civilian purposes. The new estimate says that the enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of the next decade, a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates. But the new estimate declares with ‘high confidence’ that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt ‘was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure.’”348
The big questions: Was this U.S. intelligence assessment correct? Has Iran given up trying to build nuclear weapons?
“Maybe” was my response at the time, “and let’s hope so.” It would be wonderful to know that Iran is not the increasingly worrisome nuclear threat the U.S. and other intelligence agencies had been saying it was right up to the release of the NIE.
But there is, of course, always the possibility that the U.S. assessment is wrong.
The accuracy of some of our intelligence reports in the Middle East has certainly been called into question in recent years, and rightly so. What’s more, we must always remember May 1998, when India and Pakistan conducted multiple nuclear weapons tests, stunning U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies, which had absolutely no idea either country was so close to getting the Bomb. At the time, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called this a “colossal failure” of the U.S. intelligence community, and he was right.349
God forbid we should have a similar failure with regard to Iran. A new intelligence failure concerning the current apocalyptic regime in Tehran could be a cataclysmic failure, not merely a colossal one.
And even if Iran did, in fact, briefly halt development of nuclear weapons in 2003, much has happened since then that could have changed the calculus in Tehran.
For one thing, the United States and our allies liberated Iraq in 2003. Is it possible Iran restarted its nuclear weapons program for defensive reasons after major ground operations ended, trying to prevent Iran from ever being “liberated” by the U.S. or any other country or coalition? For another thing, Ahmadinejad came to power in August 2005. Is it possible that Iran restarted its nuclear weapons program for offensive reasons, hoping to set the stage for the Islamic messiah to appear?
NIE skeptics abounded, then and now. Numerous former U.S. diplomats, intelligence analysts, and military experts at home and abroad doubted whether the assessment of Iran’s intentions and capabilities was accurate.350 And in a rare unanimous convergence of agreement, the editorial pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post expressed similar doubts.
The Times warned that the NIE “is not an argument for anyone to let down their guard when it comes to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”351
The Journal pointed out that “as recently as 2005, the consensus estimate of our spooks was that ‘Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons’ and do so ‘despite its international obligations and international pressure.’ This was a ‘high confidence’ judgment. The new NIE says Iran abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 ‘in response to increasing international scrutiny.’ This too is a ‘high confidence’ conclusion. One of the two conclusions is wrong, and casts considerable doubt on the entire process by which these ‘estimates’—the consensus of 16 intelligence bureaucracies—are conducted and accorded gospel status.”352
The Post, as skeptical as the others, rightly highlighted the fact that “while U.S. intelligence agencies have ‘high confidence’ that covert work on a bomb was suspended ‘for at least several years’ after 2003, there is only ‘moderate confidence’ that Tehran has not restarted the military program.” Furthermore, the Post noted—somewhat ominously, I might add—that “Iran’s massive overt investment in uranium enrichment meanwhile proceeds in defiance of binding U.N. resolutions, even though Tehran has no legitimate use for enriched uranium” and “the U.S. estimate of when Iran might produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb—sometime between late 2009 and the middle of the ne
xt decade—hasn’t changed.”353
And new information has come to light since the NIE was written. At the close of 2007, an investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) revealed that Iran has obtained on the black market blueprints to build nuclear warheads. “Both the IAEA and other experts have categorized the instructions outlined in the blueprints as having no value outside of a nuclear weapons program,” reported the Associated Press. “Senior IAEA officials were refused interviews with at least two top Iranian nuclear officials suspected of possible involvement in a weapons program, they said. One was the leader of a physics laboratory at Lavizan, outside Tehran, which was razed before the agency had a chance to investigate activities there. The other was in charge of developing Iran’s centrifuges, used to enrich uranium.”354
By February of 2008, the IAEA told top U.S. officials that it had received from multiple member states “extensive documentation that detailed Iran’s past attempts to develop a nuclear warhead.”355 Shortly thereafter, the U.N.’s chief nuclear weapons inspector told a closed-door meeting of international diplomats that “the agency had gathered intelligence from around ten countries suggesting Iran was engaged in weaponization studies.” He specifically noted the discovery of a fifteen-page Iranian document that described the process of machining uranium metal into two hemispheres of the kind used in nuclear warheads, which he found “alarming,” noting that “there was no reason why a country would need to possess such a document unless they wanted to produce uranium hemispheres for a nuclear weapon.”356
In the summer of 2008, Ahmadinejad announced that Iran possessed six thousand centrifuges, machines capable of enriching uranium to weapons-grade standards, almost double the number the U.N. had said Iran was using just a few months earlier.357
Meanwhile, that summer Iran tested missiles with a range of at least 1,250 miles—capable of hitting sections of eastern and southern Europe—each of which was capable of carrying nuclear warheads once those were ready.358 Iran also launched their Omid (“hope”) satellite into orbit, raising concerns that if they had the technical expertise to put rockets into space, they were also closing in on the day when they could launch a long-range, intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting North America.359
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