Obama's challenger

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/JPost
18 April '10

President Obama recently claimed that his policy towards Iran has resulted in an increasing isolation of the regime in Teheran. Now Iran's president has responded, countering that it isn't Iran, but the US and Obama that are isolated.

According to a CNN report, Ahmadinejad declared in a speech broadcast on Iranian TV that "Obama has only one way to remain in power and be successful. This way is Iran." Ahmadinejad confidently claimed that the US was no longer "at the height of glory," but was instead "collapsing." His assessment was that Americans "have many economic and cultural problems. They have security problems in the world and their influence in Iraq and Afghanistan is vanishing."

The Iranian president also said that the US would like to dominate the Middle East but was unable do so without Iran's cooperation, and insisted that "the nuclear issue" was just a pretext. Teasing Obama to deliver on the change he had promised, Ahmadinejad announced that he had sent the American president a message telling him that there had not yet been "any genuine change," and according to CNN, Ahmadinejad referred to American-Israeli relations when he added: "Superficial changes do not matter."

Ahmadinejad's posturing sounds as if he was trying to make the case for Lee Smith's fascinating new book The Strong Horse, where Smith writes:

"Iran and the resistance bloc [i.e. Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and some Iraqi groups] compete with the United States and its allies to impose regional order as the strong horse."

Smith's "strong horse" thesis seems even more persuasive in view of Teheran's efforts to organize an "international denuclearization conference" that is taking place this weekend under the motto "Nuclear Energy for All, Nuclear Weapons for No One". While one Iranian official denied that this gathering was meant to compete with Obama's recent nuclear security summit, Al Jazeera interviewed an Iranian analyst who noted that Ahmadinejad's opening speech was "targeting a global audience." As the analyst explained:

Most countries in the world do feel that the UN Security Council as well as the IAEA board of governors is not democratic, so it is something that most people in the south have a great deal of sympathy with [...] The problem that Iran is facing right now is the fact that western countries are very much biased against the country. So he [i.e. Ahmadinejad] is using this opportunity to point out Iran's position and show that it is a very reasonable and logical one and the reason that Iran is unable to get its voice across is because these bodies are undemocratic."

Right, why shouldn't Iran be the champion of democracy for the downtrodden "people in the south"?

(Read full article)

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