How Iran brokered a secret deal to put its ally in power in Iraq

Tehran's influence in Baghdad politics described by western official as 'nothing less than a strategic defeat' for US

In the sprawling slums of Baghdad's Shia heartland, signs of triumph are everywhere. Loyalists of Muqtada al-Sadr are posting giant images of the cleric in hospitals, schools and on neighbourhood squares. Cakes and nuts, usually reserved for festivals, are being served to guests of key officials.

Sadr's followers say theirs is a movement whose time has come. It has been like this for 16 days, since the exiled cleric confirmed his support for a second term for the incumbent prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. That move looks set to revolutionise political life in Iraq and, potentially, recast the brittle nation's dealings with the west.

Hours after Sadr's endorsement, on 1 October, the bulk of Iraq's Shia political blocs announced that Maliki was their candidate for prime minister, after seven months of political torpor.

This crystallised two things; that Maliki would likely out-manoeuvre his rivals, and that those who supported him would want, in return, more than their share of treasure. On the regional chessboard that is Iraqi politics, Maliki's move was akin to putting his key rival, Iyad Allawi, in check.

The price sought has now begun to emerge, along with a picture of how Sadr's support was won and what it means for Britain and the US, who have invested 4,500 lives, billions of pounds and their international standing in the hope of shaping Iraq as a western-oriented democracy that realigns the regional balance.

According to Guardian sources, Maliki's renewed grasp on power and the Sadrists' elevation as influence brokers have been brought about by a consortium of the Middle East's most-powerful Shia Islamic players, whose power bases are rooted in the region's other main player, arch US foe Iran.

It has been spearheaded by the Islamic Dawa party, which opposed Saddam Hussein from a base in Tehran during the Ba'athist years, as well as by Maliki's adviser, Tareq Najim Abdullah. Sadr and Ayatollah Kazem al-Haeri, a key exiled figure, who has acted as Sadr's godfather, also led the way.

Qassem Suleimani, head of the al-Quds brigades, a division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and the head of Lebanese Hezbollah's politburo, Mohammed Kawtharani, also heavily influenced the process. Above them all, two Shia Islamic overlords, Grand Ayatollah Khameini, and Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah are understood to have been involved in getting Sadr onside. In interviews over the past week, important players in Iraq's power base have divulged the essence of what they believe the Sadrists demanded from Maliki's envoys. It includes a grant of three ministries from his own quota, bringing to seven the number of ministries that the Sadrists could hold in a new government.

It also includes the position of secretary-general of the cabinet and, crucially, deputy positions in all the security agencies. A total of 100,000 roles allocated to Sadrists in government agencies appears to be on the table, as is a mass release of Sadrist prisoners.

A leading Sadrist, Nassar al-Rubaie, said that they were entitled to 25% from each ministry. The Sadrists won 40 seats in the 325-seat parliament. "The electoral process has delivered people who make decisions in this country and we are an important part of that group."

Rubaie said the proposals offered by Maliki's envoys had been enough to win Sadr's support, even though the cleric had publicly stated that he could not abide a second term for the prime minister whose government he abandoned in 2007. Maliki's response then was to send the army to rout Sadr's militia in Sadr City and Basra, igniting a bitter feud.

A high-ranking third party was needed to break the stalemate, as trust was non-existent on both sides. In early September, the Iranians made the first move. Haeri told his understudy that Maliki was the way forward; he was not perfect, but both he and the Iranians thought they could work with him.

Maliki then made his move. He sent Najim Abdullah and the head of the Dawa party, Abdul-Halim al-Zuhairi, to the Iranian shrine city of Qom, to meet with Sadr. There they met Suleimani, Iran's most powerful military general and nemesis of the US.

Suleimani has led the Quds force for the past 20 years. "He runs Iran's policy in Iraq," said a senior Iraqi official. "There is no dispute about this."

Suleimani is also a key link to Hezbollah in Lebanon and to Hamas in Gaza, supplying weapons, money and training to help oppose Israel. A senior US official in Baghdad claimed this summer that the Iranian military was responsible for about 25% of all US casualties in Iraq. US intelligence officials believe Suleimani's unit accounted for nearly all of them.

According to an authoritative source, Kawtharani was also at the meeting in Qom. The two courtiers, Abdullah and Zuhairi, discussed options with Sadr. He liked what he heard, but would not sign on without a guarantor. Suleimani put his name forward, but Sadr was aiming higher. He sought two of Shia Islam's highest authorities to ratify what was being put to him – Khameini and Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Sadr was won over, but Nasrallah's name came with a condition. According to the source, when Nasrallah, who remained in Beirut, was consulted, he asked for a return guarantee from Maliki that the US military would disappear completely from Iraq by the end of 2011.

"Maliki told them he will never extend, or renew [any bases] or give any facilities to the Americans or British after the end of next year," the source said. "They then went to try to smooth things over with the Syrians."

Syria was an obstacle in the process, partially because ill-feeling between Maliki and the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, had been exacerbated by Maliki alleging in August 2009 that Damascus was harbouring senior Ba'athist leaders who had blown up two ministries in the centre of Baghdad, undermining his security credentials.

"Zuhairi met Assad at Damascus airport. In public and private he was very much opposed to Maliki before the meeting," said the source.

Around the same time the Iranians made their second move. Ahmadinejad touched down in Damascus on 18 September on his way to the UN in New York. The pair spoke for two hours. According to a senior Iraqi government official in the days afterwards, Assad told his advisers: "Our Iranian friends want Maliki, and Maliki it is."

It was a crucial circuit-breaker, which allowed Maliki to make concrete plans for a new administration that would be dramatically different from the last, both in make-up and orientation.

Ahmadinejad returned from New York six days later and at a final meeting in Tehran the deal was ratified. The first domino was then tipped – the Sadrists' announcement. Then came the Shia list's pledge of support for Maliki.

The last seven years have been a tug of war for the heartland of Arabia, underpinned by the nagging strategic challenge of whether Iraq will emerge as a strategic ally of the west.

The US was a primary player, but as its military withdraws, its influence plummets. The US embassy in Baghdad had thrown its weight behind a second term for Maliki, believing his secular rival, Allawi, is untenable as leader because his support base is largely Sunni. "That position only served to embolden Maliki and the Iranians," said a senior western diplomat. "It was poorly conceived, poorly executed and utterly disastrous in its consequences."

Last week, a US official offered an explanation: "We have switched from frontline players with muscle that we could wield, to straight diplomacy."

In July, that same official said: "[The Sadrists'] world view and view of relations with the US is totally incompatible with any relationship that we could have."

The US transition from military overlord to would-be democratic partner has escaped no one's attention, nor has the vacuum left behind gone unremarked.

Publicly, however, the Dawa party is maintaining a different line. "There is no contradiction between the Iranian point of view and the US view in forming a new government," said Zuhairi. "For example, the Americans have said this will be a Shia-led government. So, I say the Iraqi project is a reconciliation between Iran and the US."

A western official claimed it was "nothing of the sort", then, offering his view on recent US diplomatic efforts, said: "This is nothing less than a strategic defeat.

"They could not have got this more wrong if they tried

Omar Khadr's "Guilty" Plea

He was the first child soldier to be prosecuted by a Western country since World War II, dragged out from under the rubble of a Jihadist compound bombed by the US in the state you can see above. He was a 15-year old Canadian who was interrogated thus:

During pretrial hearings, Khadr's lead interrogator at Bagram admitted in court that, in addition to yelling, cursing and throwing furniture during interrogations, he had told Khadr a fictitious story about another Afghan teenager captured by U.S. forces who was gang-raped by "big black guys" in prison and likely killed by them, all because he didn't cooperate with interrogators. This "Interrogator #1" -- who was later court-martialled for abusing other prisoners -- interviewed Omar Khadr about 25 times. Khadr's lawyers made a motion to suppress Khadr's statements on the grounds that they were elicited by torture and abuse.

Khadr himself has claimed via Wiki:

that he was refused pain medication for his wounds, that he had his hands tied above a door frame for hours, had cold water thrown on him, had a bag placed over his head and was threatened with military dogs, was flatulated upon, forced to carry 5-gallon pails of water to aggravate his shoulder wound. Unallowed to use washrooms, he was forced to urinate on himself.[50][59] His chief interrogator was Joshua Claus, who later pleaded guilty to abusing detainees to extract confessions following the in-custody death of wrongly accused Dilawar that same year.[62]

Confessions made under those circumstances were allowed in his trial. He has subsequently confessed to more crimes than he had originally been charged with. It seems he was indeed involved in a firefight in Afghanistan which became very deadly, had been caught up with Jihadists connected with his father, and had prepped explosives. He was not innocent of involvement with al Qaeda; but he was 15 years old, and in the battle that wounded him (whose complicated and contested details you can read about here) he was in a compound blasted with 500 pound bombs, buried under rubble, shot twice in the back, and sustained injuries that left one eye blind and the other with shrapnel still embedded. This is what remained of the building he was in after the bombing, of which he was the lone survivor:

Khadr has already spent several years in Gitmo, after brutal treatment at Bagram - and Daphne Eviatar explains the choice he faced:

If Khadr had gone to trial, he faced a potential life sentence from a military jury, who would hear how he "confessed" to the crimes in interrogation. He could have faced many more years in prison. What's more, the U.S. maintains the right to indefinitely detain him even if he was found not guilty.

His plea allows him to be released to a Canadian jail to serve out seven of his eight remaining years. Somehow, I doubt he will remain behind bars once he is remanded to a country that obeys international law about treatment of child soldiers and prohibits abuse, coercion and torture in interrogations. But it remains a source of shame for Canada's government that, for so long, it bowed to US pressure and did so little to rescue this misguided teen from the custody he will now have to endure for only one more year.

I don't know how anyone who cares about the integrity and moral standing of the United States can absorb the full details of this case and not be profoundly ashamed. To prosecute a child soldier, already nearly killed in battle, tortured and abused in custody, and to imprison him for this length of time and even now, convict him of charges for which there is next to no proof but his own coerced confessions ... well, words fail

How Einstein Divided America's Jews

By WALTER ISAACSON


In 1921, Albert Einstein’s first trip to America triggered the kind of mass hysteria that would greet the Beatles four decades later. But as newly published documents show, it also tore a sharp rift between European Zionists and some of their fellow Jews across the Atlantic, men like Louis D. Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, who felt that the best way for Jews to get ahead was to assimilate, not agitate for a Jewish homeland.

ALBERT EINSTEIN’S FIRST tour of America was an extravaganza unique in the history of science, and indeed would have been remarkable for any realm: a grand two-month processional in the spring of 1921 that evoked the sort of mass frenzy and press adulation that would thrill a touring rock star. Einstein had recently burst into global stardom when observations performed during a total eclipse dramatically confirmed his theory of relativity by showing that the sun’s gravitational field bent a light beam to the degree that he had predicted. The New York Times trumpeted that triumph with a multideck headline:

Lights All Askew in the Heavens / Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations / EINSTEIN THEORY TRIUMPHS / Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry
So when he arrived in New York in April, he was greeted by adoring throngs as the world’s first scientific celebrity, one who also happened to be a gentle icon of humanist values and a living patron saint for Jews.

Newly published papers from that year, however, show a less joyful aspect to Einstein’s famous visit. He found himself caught in a battle between ardent European Zionists led by Chaim Weizmann, who was with Einstein on the trip, and the more polished and cautious potentates of American Jewry, including Louis D. Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and the denizens of established Wall Street banking firms. Among other things, the disputes about Zionism apparently caused Einstein not to be invited to lecture at Harvard and prompted many prominent Manhattan Jews to decline an invitation from him to discuss his pet project, the establishment of a university in Jerusalem.

The full extent of this controversy, which has been only touched upon in previous books (including a biography I wrote in 2007), is revealed in a volume of Einstein’s correspondence and papers for 1921 that was recently published by the Princeton University Press. None of the letters is newly discovered (all are available in public archives), but most have not been published before. The 600-page volume, the 12th compiled so far by the editors of the Einstein Papers Project, pulls all of the letters and related documents together in a way that allows us now to see, even more clearly than Einstein did at the time, the political and emotional struggle he stumbled into.

Einstein was raised in a secular German Jewish household, and (except for a brief fling with religious fervor as a child) he disdained religious faith and rituals. He did, however, proudly consider himself Jewish by heritage, and he felt a strong kinship with what he called his fellow tribesmen or clansmen. His outlook in 1921 can be seen in the brusque answer he sent early that year to the rabbis of Berlin, who had urged him to become a dues-paying member of the Jewish religious community there. “In your letter,” he responded, “I notice that the word Jew is ambiguous in that it refers (1) to nationality and origin, (2) to the faith. I am a Jew in the first sense, not in the second.”

German anti-Semitism was then on the rise. Many German Jews did everything they could, including converting to Christianity, in order to assimilate, and they urged Einstein to do the same. But Einstein took the opposite approach. He began to identify even more strongly with his Jewish heritage, and he embraced the Zionist goal of promoting a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

He had been recruited by the pioneering Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld, who paid a call on Einstein in Berlin in early 1919. “With extreme naïveté he asked questions,” Blumenfeld recalled. Among Einstein’s queries: With their intellectual gifts, why should Jews create a homeland that was primarily agricultural? Why did it have to be its own nation-state? Wasn’t nationalism the problem rather than the solution? Eventually, Einstein came around. “I am, as a human being, an opponent of nationalism,” he told Blumenfeld. “But as a Jew, I am from today a supporter of the Zionist effort.” He also became, more specifically, an advocate for the creation of a Jewish university in Jerusalem, which became Hebrew University.

Einstein had initially thought that his first visit to the United States, which he jokingly called “Dollaria,” might be a way to make some money in a stable currency. He and his first wife had gone through a bitter divorce, and they were still fighting over finances. Hamburg banker Max Warburg and his New York–based brother Paul tried to help Einstein line up lucrative lectures. They asked both Princeton and the University of Wisconsin for a fee of $15,000. In February of 1921, Max Warburg informed him, “The amount you wish is not possible.” Einstein was not terribly upset. “They found my demands too high,” he told his friend and fellow physicist Paul Ehrenfest. “I am glad not to have to go there; it really isn’t a pretty way to make money.” Instead, he made other plans: he would go to Brussels to present a paper at the Solvay Conference, the preeminent European gathering of physicists.

It was then that Blumenfeld came by Einstein’s apartment again, this time with an invitation—or perhaps an instruction—in the form of a telegram from the president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann. A brilliant biochemist who had emigrated from Russia to England, Weizmann asked Einstein to accompany him on a trip to America to raise funds to help settle Palestine and, in particular, create Hebrew University in Jerusalem. When Blumenfeld read the telegram to him, Einstein balked. He was not an orator, he said, and the idea of using his celebrity to draw crowds to the cause was “an unworthy one.” Blumenfeld did not argue. Instead, he simply read Weizmann’s telegram aloud again. “He is the president of our organization,” Blumenfeld said, “and if you take your conversion to Zionism seriously, then I have the right to ask you, in Dr. Weizmann’s name, to go with him to the United States.”

“What you say is right and convincing,” Einstein replied, to the “boundless astonishment” of Blumenfeld. “I realize that I myself am now part of the situation and that I must accept the invitation.” Weizmann was thrilled and somewhat surprised. “I wholeheartedly appreciate your readiness at such a decisive hour for the Jewish people,” he later cabled Einstein from London.

Einstein’s decision reflected a major transformation in his life. Until the completion of his general theory of relativity, he had dedicated himself almost totally to science. But the anti-Semitism that was oozing up around him in Berlin led him to reassert his identity as a Jew and to feel more committed to defending the culture and community of his people. “I am not keen on going to America, but am just doing it on behalf of the Zionists,” he wrote to his French publisher. “I must serve as famed bigwig and decoy-bird … I am doing whatever I can for my tribal brethren, who are being treated so vilely everywhere.”

And so Einstein and his new wife, Elsa, set sail in late March 1921 for their first visit to America. On the way over, Einstein tried to explain relativity to Weizmann. Asked upon their arrival whether he understood the theory, Weizmann gave a puckish reply: “Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.”

When the ship pulled up to the Battery in Lower Manhattan on the afternoon of April 2, Einstein was standing on the deck, wearing a black felt hat that concealed some but not all of his now-graying profusion of uncombed hair. One hand held a shiny briar pipe; the other clutched a worn violin case. “He looked like an artist,” The New York Times reported. “But underneath his shaggy locks was a scientific mind whose deductions have staggered the ablest intellects of Europe.”

Thousands of spectators, along with the fife-and-drum corps of the Jewish Legion, were waiting in Battery Park when the mayor and other dignitaries brought Einstein ashore on a police tugboat. The crowd, waving blue-and-white flags, sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then the Zionist anthem, “Hatikvah.” The Einsteins and the Weizmanns intended to head directly for the Hotel Commodore, in Midtown. Instead, their motorcade wound through the Jewish neighborhoods of the Lower East Side late into the evening. “Every car had its horn, and every horn was put in action,” Weizmann recalled. “We reached the Commodore at about 11:30, tired, hungry, thirsty, and completely dazed.”

One group was missing at most of the subsequent welcoming ceremonies and celebrations: the leaders of the Zionist Organization of America. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who was its honorary president, did not even send pro forma official greetings or congratulations. Brandeis had traveled with Weizmann to Palestine in 1919, and the following year had gone to London to be with him at a Zionist convention. But shortly afterward they began to feud. Their fight partly stemmed from a few differences over policy; Brandeis wanted the Zionist organizations to focus on sending money to Jewish settlers in Palestine and not on agitating politically. It was also partly an old-fashioned power struggle; Brandeis wanted to install efficient managers and take power from Weizmann and his more ardent eastern European followers. But above all, it was a clash of personalities. Weizmann was born in Russia, emigrated to England, and shared Einstein’s disdain for Jews who tried too hard to assimilate. Brandeis was born in Louisville, Kentucky, graduated from Harvard Law School, prospered as a prominent Boston lawyer, and was appointed by President Wilson to be the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court. His crowd tended to look down on unrefined and unassimilated Jews from Russia and eastern Europe. In a letter to his brother in 1921, Brandeis revealed the cultural and personal underpinnings of his rift with Weizmann:

The Zionist [clash] was inevitable. It was one resulting from differences in standards. The Easterners—like many Russian Jews in this country—don’t know what honesty is & we simply won’t entrust our money to them. Weizmann does know what honesty is—but weakly yields to his numerous Russian associates. Hence the split.
Brandeis was initially happy that Einstein was coming to America, even though he was accompanying Weizmann. “The Great Einstein is coming to America soon with Dr. Weizmann, our Zionist Chief,” he wrote to his mother-in-law.

Palestine may need something more than a new conception of the Universe or of several additional dimensions; but it is well to remind the Gentile world, when the wave of anti-Semitism is rising, that in the world of thought the conspicuous contributions are being made by Jews.

But two of Brandeis’s closest associates expressed misgivings. His protégé Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, and Judge Julian Mack, the person Brandeis had tapped to be president of the Zionist Organization of America, argued that it would be better if Einstein’s visit were cast primarily as a trip to lecture on physics, rather than one to raise money for Palestine.

Frankfurter and Mack sent Weizmann telegrams urging him to make sure that Einstein scheduled some physics lectures during his trip. But they quickly changed their minds when they were informed that Einstein had tried to extract large fees from various universities for such lectures, even though he was speaking about Zionism for free. That was even worse. So they sent another telegram, this one warning of the danger that Einstein would be seen as trying to “commercialize” his science. Such crassness would hurt his image and that of Jews, Frankfurter and Mack feared. Some of the physics lectures should be done for free. As Mack cabled to Weizmann: “EINSTEIN SITUATION EXTREMELY DIFFICULT EXPEDIENT YOU EXPLAIN US FULLY HIS EXACT NEGOTIATIONS … ALSO AWAITING YOU PROMISED CABLE WHETHER HE ACCEPT YOUR SUGGESTIONCOUPLE UNIVERSITY LECTURES FREE.” In one telegram, they went so far as to urge that Einstein’s trip be canceled. Another telegram made clear that there would be no lecture at the university where Frankfurter was an influential professor. “HARVARD ABSOLUTELY DECLINES EINSTEIN,” the telegram read. It did add that he would be welcome to come for an informal visit without a lecture or a lecture fee. When Einstein found out about the telegrams, he was furious. Mack defended himself and Frankfurter—and by extension Brandeis—in a letter to Einstein insisting that their only motive was “to protect you against unjust attacks and to protect the organization against the result of such unjust attacks.”

Brandeis and his cohorts at the Zionist Organization of America made matters worse, during Einstein’s visit, when they reacted to a deadly clash between Arab and Jewish rioters in Jaffa by reinforcing their desire that adequate “safeguards” be in place before money was raised for Hebrew University. Einstein confided that this attitude made him suspect that the Brandeis crowd was “committing sabotage” of his mission. When Brandeis’s friend and supporter Rabbi Judah Magnes proposed hosting a gathering in Manhattan for intellectuals to talk about the university, Einstein replied that he would come only if Magnes made the event a fund-raiser. “I did not have in mind a fund-raising meeting,” Magnes replied in a cold and curt letter. “Under the circumstances, it is probably better to forego the meeting.”

The resistance to Einstein’s mission came not only from the Brandeis camp of cautious and restrained American Zionists, but also from successful New York Reform Jews of German heritage, many of whom were opposed to Zionism. When Einstein invited 50 or so of New York’s most prominent Jews to a private meeting in his hotel, many of them declined. Paul Warburg, who had served as his agent soliciting lecture fees, wrote:

My presence would be of no use; on the contrary, I fear that, if at all, its effect would be rather to cool things down. As I already told you on another occasion, I personally have the greatest doubts relating to the Zionist plans and anticipate their consequences with genuine consternation.
Other rejections came from Arthur Hays Sulzberger of The New York Times; the politically connected financier Bernard Baruch; the lawyer Irving Lehman; the first Jewish Cabinet secretary, Oscar Straus; the philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim; and the former Congressman Jefferson Levy.

On the other hand, Einstein and Weizmann were wildly embraced by less assimilated and more enthusiastic Jews, the ones who tended to live in Brooklyn or on the Lower East Side rather than on Park Avenue. More than 20,000 showed up at one event, causing “a near riot,” The Times reported, when they “stormed the police lines.” After three weeks of lectures and receptions in New York, Einstein paid a visit to Washington. For reasons fathomable only to those who live in that city, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks,” Kindred replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.”

Such discourse made it inevitable that when Einstein went with a group to the White House, President Warren G. Harding would be faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for the cameras, he smiled and confessed that he did not. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding had given to his governing philosophy. The New York Times ran a front-page headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.”

During the Washington visit, the noted journalist and power broker Walter Lippmann tried to set up a peace meeting between Weizmann and Brandeis. Negotiations between the camps of the two Zionist leaders broke down over a variety of issues, and the summit never occurred. Einstein, however, was happy to pay a call on Brandeis, even though Weizmann urged him not to. They hit it off well. Einstein told the friend who arranged the visit that he came away with an “utterly different” opinion of Brandeis than the one pushed on him by Weizmann. Brandeis was also pleased. “Prof. & Mrs. Einstein are simple lovely folk,” he wrote his wife the next day. “It proved impossible to avoid some discussion of the ‘break,’ though they are not in [it]. They specialize on the University.” The one day of personal harmony, however, ended up doing nothing to heal the rift between the Weizmann-Einstein camp and the Brandeis-Frankfurter one, which continued to worsen during the visit.

Einstein subsequently went to Princeton, where he delivered a weeklong series of scientific lectures and received an honorary degree “for voyaging through strange seas of thought.” He did not get the $15,000 fee he had originally requested, but he did receive a more modest one, plus a deal that Princeton would publish his lectures as a book and give him a 15 percent royalty. Einstein’s lectures were very technical. They included more than 125 complex equations that he scribbled on the blackboard while speaking in German. As one student admitted to a reporter, “I sat in the balcony, but he talked right over my head anyway.”

Einstein seemed to like Princeton. “Young and fresh,” he called it. “A pipe as yet unsmoked.” From a man who was invariably fondling new briar pipes, this was a compliment. It would not be a surprise, a dozen years hence, that he would decide to move there permanently.

Harvard, where Einstein went next, did not endear itself quite as well. Einstein graciously took a tour of the campus, dropping in on labs and commenting on students’ work, even though he had been explicitly not invited to give a formal lecture there. For the rest of his U.S. trip, he and Frankfurter engaged in an exchange of letters in which the Harvard professor tried to deflect the blame for the snub. People have “accused me of having wanted to prevent your appearance at Harvard,” Frankfurter wrote in a short note. “The accusation is absolutely untrue.” Einstein, however, knew of the telegrams that Frankfurter and Mack had sent objecting to Einstein’s request for lecture fees. “It now does seem plausible to me that you acted the way you did with honest, good intentions,” Einstein replied, not quite accepting Frankfurter’s denial. He added a humorous jab at Jews such as Frankfurter who were eager to avoid ruffling the refined sensibilities of non-Jews. “It would not even have been serious if all universities had withheld invitations,” he wrote, “although I certainly know that it is a Jewish weakness always anxiously to want to keep the Gentiles [Gojims] in a good mood.”

One of the final stops on the grand Einstein-Weizmann tour was Cleveland, where several thousands thronged the train depot to meet the visiting delegation. The parade included 200 honking and flag-draped cars. Einstein and Weizmann rode in an open car, preceded by a National Guard marching band and a cadre of Jewish war veterans in uniform. Admirers along the way grabbed onto Einstein’s car and jumped on the running board, while police tried to pull them away.

The Zionist Organization of America was about to meet in Cleveland for its annual convention, and the “downtown” Jews loyal to Weizmann were preparing for a showdown with the “uptown” Jews loyal to Brandeis. The convention turned out to be raucous indeed, with bitter speeches that included denunciations of the Brandeis camp for, among other sins, not showing enthusiasm for Einstein’s trip. Weizmann’s supporters, fortified by his presence, were able to block a vote of confidence endorsing the leadership of Brandeis and his point man, Julian Mack. Mack immediately resigned as president, Brandeis resigned as honorary president, and others in the Brandeis camp—including Felix Frankfurter and Stephen S. Wise—resigned from the executive committee. The deep rift in American Zionism would persist, and would undermine the movement, for almost a decade.

Einstein was not at the convention. He had already boarded a ship back to Europe, feeling somewhat baffled and amused by what he had seen in America. “It is more easily aroused to enthusiasm than other countries I have unsettled with my presence,” he wrote to his best friend, Michele Besso.

I had to let myself be shown around like a prize ox … It’s a miracle that I endured it. But now it’s finished and what remains is the fine feeling of having done something truly good and of having worked for the Jewish cause despite all the protests by Jews and non-Jews—most of our fellow tribesmen are smarter than they are courageous.
The opposition he encountered served only to deepen his support for the Zionist cause. “Zionism really offers a new Jewish ideal that can give the Jewish people joy in its own existence again,” he wrote Paul Ehrenfest right after the trip. In this regard, he was part of a trend that was reshaping Jewish identity, by choice and by imposition, in Europe. “Until a generation ago, Jews in Germany did not consider themselves as members of the Jewish people,” he told a reporter on the day he was leaving America. “They merely considered themselves as members of a religious community.” But anti-Semitism changed that, and there was a silver lining to that cloud, he declared. “The undignified mania of trying to adapt and conform and assimilate, which happens among many of my social standing, has always been very repulsive to me.”

The fund-raising part of Einstein’s tour was only a modest success. Even though poorer Jews and recent immigrants had poured out to see him and donated with enthusiasm, few of the eminent and old-line Jews with great personal fortunes became part of the frenzy. Only $750,000 was collected for Hebrew University, far less than the $4 million that Einstein and Weizmann had hoped for. But that was a good enough start. “The university seems to be financially secured,” Einstein wrote Ehrenfest.

Four years later, the university did indeed open, on top of Mount Scopus, overlooking Jerusalem. In an ironic twist, some of the New York financiers who initially spurned Einstein ended up supporting it, and they insisted on installing as chancellor Rabbi Judah Magnes, the person who had clashed with Einstein in 1921 and canceled a reception when Einstein insisted on turning it into a fund-raiser. Einstein was so upset by the appointment of Magnes that he resigned from the board in protest. Nevertheless, he would eventually leave his papers and much of his estate to the university.

There was one other ironic footnote. In 1946, after he had emigrated to America, Einstein again became associated with fund-raising for a Jewish university. The organization was initially called the Albert Einstein Foundation for Higher Learning, and it acquired the campus of a dying university near Boston. But once again, Einstein clashed with some of the donors and their choices for administrators. When they asked whether they could name the university after him, Einstein refused. So the founders decided instead to honor their second choice, who had died five years earlier. They named the new university Brandeis.


*Walter Isaacson is the president and chief executive officer of the Aspen Institute and the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007).

UMBERTO ECO: Democracy is in danger

Dear Friends,

While expressing my solidarity with your manifesation, I would hope that it will serve to recall two points which one is often tempted to forget:

1. Democracy does not mean that the majority is right. It means that the majority has the right to govern.

2. Democracy does not mean that the minority is wrong. It means that while it respects the government of the majority, it expresses itself each time it believes the majority is wrong or believes that it (the majority) is performing acts against the laws, against morality and the very principles of democracy, and it must do this always and with the utmost energy because this is the mandate it (the minority) has received from citizens. When the majority claims it is always right and the minority does not dare to react, democracy is in danger.

Umberto Eco
July 2, 2008

Slavoj Žižek : Post-Wall

19 November 2009

It is commonplace, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to hear the events of that time described as miraculous, a dream come true, something one couldn’t have imagined even a couple of months beforehand. Free elections in Poland with Lech Walesa as president: who would have thought it possible? But an even greater miracle took place only a couple of years later: free democratic elections returned the ex-Communists to power, Walesa was marginalised and much less popular than General Jaruzelski himself.

This reversal is usually explained in terms of the ‘immature’ expectations of the people, who simply didn’t have a realistic image of capitalism: they wanted to have their cake and eat it, they wanted capitalist-democratic freedom and material abundance without having to adapt to life in a ‘risk society’ – i.e. without losing the security and stability (more or less) guaranteed by the Communist regimes. When the sublime mist of the ‘velvet revolution’ had been dispelled by the new democratic-capitalist reality, people reacted in one of three ways: with nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of Communism; by embracing right-wing nationalist populism; with belated anti-Communist paranoia. The first two reactions are easy to understand, and they often overlap (as in today’s Russia). The same rightists who, decades ago, were shouting ‘Better dead than red!’ are now often heard mumbling ‘Better red than eating hamburgers.’ The nostalgia for Communism shouldn’t be taken too seriously: far from expressing an actual wish to return to a grey Socialist reality, it is a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. And nationalist populism, far from being peculiar to Eastern Europe, is a common feature of all countries caught in the vortex of globalisation.

Much more interesting is the recent resurrection of anti-Communism, everywhere from Hungary to Slovenia. In October 2006, large protests against the ruling Socialist Party paralysed Hungary for weeks. Protesters blamed the country’s economic crisis on its leaders, the Communists’ successors. They denied the legitimacy of the government, although it came to power after democratic elections, and when police were used to restore a minimum level of civil order, comparisons were drawn with the Soviet army’s crushing of the 1956 uprising. In short, it was said that the Velvet Revolution of 1989 had to be repeated since, beneath the false appearance of democracy, nothing had really changed, the same dark forces were pulling the strings of power. In December 2006, Poland strengthened the ‘lustration’ law, which made it illegal for collaborators with the Communist secret police and others linked with the old regime to hold public office.

Another aspect of the same process is the redefinition in the Baltic countries and in Slovakia of Nazi collaborators as ‘anti-Communist combatants’; their collaboration, even their participation in anti-semitic pogroms, is justified as a tough but necessary part of the patriotic struggle against Communism, as a lesser evil. In the Ukrainian Velvet Revolution that brought Viktor Yushchenko to power, the same songs were sung that used to be sung by Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with the German occupation. No wonder that, at the instigation of some post-Communist countries, the European Parliament passed a resolution equating Communism with Nazism. And no wonder that, in Slovenia, the populist right reproaches the left for being a ‘force of continuity’ – with the old Communist regime. New problems and challenges are seen in terms of old struggles and the call for gay rights darkly interpreted as part of a Communist plot to demoralise the nation.

How and why are these ghosts being raised in countries where many young people don’t even remember Communism? Anti-Communists ask a simple question – ‘If capitalism is really so much better than socialism, why are our lives still miserable?’ – and offer an equally straightforward answer: it is because we don’t yet have capitalism, we don’t yet have true democracy. Ex-Communists are still in power, disguised as owners and managers. We need another purge, the revolution must be repeated. One can’t help noticing the resemblance with the way the old Communist regime used to put the blame for its failures on the continuing influence of the ‘forces of the past’.

This new generation of anti-Communists has an image of society that is uncannily similar to the traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formal democracy is a mask concealing the rule of a wealthy minority. In other words, the anti-Communists don’t see that what they are denouncing as a perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism. Indeed, one could argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the disillusioned former Communists were better suited to run the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While the heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to indulge their dreams of a new society based on justice, honesty and solidarity, the ex-Communists were able without difficulty to accommodate themselves to the new capitalist rules. Paradoxically, in the new post-Communist condition, the anti-Communists stood for the utopian dream of a true democracy, while the ex-Communists stood for the cruel new world of market efficiency, with all its corruption and dirty tricks.

Is capitalist realism the only answer to socialist utopianism? Was what followed the fall of the Wall really the era of capitalist maturity, the leaving behind of all utopias? What if that era relied on a utopia of its own? November 1989 marked the beginning of the ‘happy 1990s’, Francis Fukuyama’s utopian ‘end of history’: liberal democracy, he announced, had effectively won, the advent of a global, liberal world community lurked just around the corner, and the remaining obstacles to this happy ending were merely contingent (pockets of resistance where the local leaders hadn’t yet grasped that their day was done). In contrast, 9/11 marked the symbolic end of the ‘happy 1990s’: it signalled the beginning of our current era, in which new walls are springing up everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the US-Mexico border – but also within single states.

It seems that Fukuyama’s 1990s utopia had to die twice: the collapse of the liberal-democratic political utopia on 9/11 did not affect the economic utopia of global market capitalism, but the 2008 financial meltdown surely has. In the 1990s, it was believed that humanity had finally found the formula for an optimal socio-economic order. The experience of the last few decades has clearly shown that the market is not a benign mechanism that works best when left alone. It requires violence to create the conditions necessary for it to function. The way market fundamentalists react to the turmoil that ensues when their ideas are implemented is typical of utopian ‘totalitarians’: they blame the failure on compromise – there is still too much state intervention – and demand an even more radical implementation of market doctrine.

Today we observe the explosion of capitalism in China and ask when it will become a democracy. But what if it never does? What if its authoritarian capitalism isn’t merely a repetition of the process of capitalist accumulation which, in Europe, went on from the 16th to the 18th century, but a sign of what is to come? What if ‘the vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market’ (Trotsky’s characterisation of tsarist Russia) proves economically more efficient than liberal capitalism? What if it shows that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer the condition and engine of economic development, but its obstacle?

And if this is the case, maybe post-Communist disappointment should not be dismissed as a sign of ‘immature’ expectations. When people protested against Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, most of them weren’t asking for capitalism. They wanted solidarity and a rough kind of justice; they wanted the freedom to live their own lives outside state control, to come together and talk as they pleased; they wanted to be liberated from primitive ideological indoctrination and hypocrisy. In effect they aspired to something that could best be described as ‘socialism with a human face’. Perhaps this sentiment deserves a second chance

Slavoj Žižek : Berlusconi in Tehran

23 July 2009

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapuściński, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the streetfighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now?

There are many versions of last month’s events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western ‘reform movement’, something along the lines of the colour-coded revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. They support the protests as a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution, as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic Iran freed from Muslim fundamentalism. They are countered by sceptics who think that Ahmadinejad actually won, that he is the voice of the majority, while Mousavi’s support comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. Let’s face facts, they say: in Ahmadinejad, Iran has the president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the clerical establishment whose differences from Ahmadinejad are merely cosmetic. He too wants to continue with the atomic energy programme, is against recognising Israel, and when he was prime minister in the repressive years of the war with Iraq enjoyed the full support of Khomeini.

Finally, and saddest of all, are the leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad. What is at stake for them is Iranian freedom from imperialism. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed corruption among the elite and used Iran’s oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority. This, we are told, is the true Ahmadinejad: the Holocaust-denying fanatic is a creation of the Western media. In this view, what’s been happening in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a coup, financed by the West, against the legitimate premier. This not only ignores the facts (the high electoral turnout, up from the usual 55 to 85 per cent, can be explained only as a protest vote), it also assumes, patronisingly, that Ahmadinejad is good enough for the backward Iranians: they aren’t yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular left.

Opposed to one another though they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests as a conflict between Islamic hardliners and pro-Western liberal reformists. That is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants to increase people’s freedom and introduce a market economy, or a member of the clerical establishment whose victory wouldn’t significantly change the nature of the regime? Either way, the true nature of the protests is being missed.

The green colours adopted by the Mousavi supporters and the cries of ‘Allahu akbar!’ that resonated from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness suggested that the protesters saw themselves as returning to the roots of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, and cancelling out the corruption that followed it. This was evident in the way the crowds behaved: the emphatic unity of the people, their creative self-organisation and improvised forms of protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline. Picture the march: thousands of men and women demonstrating in complete silence. This was a genuine popular uprising on the part of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution. We should contrast the events in Iran with the US intervention in Iraq: an assertion of popular will on the one hand, a foreign imposition of democracy on the other. The events in Iran can also be read as a comment on the platitudes of Obama’s Cairo speech, which focused on the dialogue between religions: no, we don’t need a dialogue between religions (or civilisations), we need a bond of political solidarity between those who struggle for justice in Muslim countries and those who participate in the same struggle elsewhere.

Two crucial observations follow. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a corrupt Islamofascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the ayatollahs. His demagogic distribution of crumbs to the poor shouldn’t deceive us: he has the backing not only of the organs of police repression and a very Westernised PR apparatus. He is also supported by a powerful new class of Iranians who have become rich thanks to the regime’s corruption – the Revolutionary Guard is not a working-class militia, but a mega-corporation, the most powerful centre of wealth in the country.

Second, we have to draw a clear distinction between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi is, effectively, a reformist, a proponent of an Iranian version of identity politics, promising favours to particular groups of every kind. Mousavi is something entirely different: he stands for the resuscitation of the popular dream that sustained the Khomeini revolution. It was a utopian dream, but one can’t deny the genuinely utopian aspect of what was so much more than a hardline Islamist takeover. Now is the time to remember the effervescence that followed the revolution, the explosion of political and social creativity, organisational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. That this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the revolution was an authentic political event, an opening that unleashed altogether new forces of social transformation: a moment in which ‘everything seemed possible.’ What followed was a gradual closing-down of possibilities as the Islamic establishment took political control. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the ‘return of the repressed’ of the Khomeini revolution.

What all this means is that there is a genuinely liberatory potential in Islam: we don’t have to go back to the tenth century to find a ‘good’ Islam, we have it right here, in front of us. The future is uncertain – the popular explosion has been contained, and the regime will regain ground. However, it will no longer be seen the same way: it will be just one more corrupt authoritarian government. Ayatollah Khamenei will lose whatever remained of his status as a principled spiritual leader elevated above the fray and appear as what he is – one opportunistic politician among many. But whatever the outcome, it is vital to keep in mind that we have witnessed a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit within the frame of a struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If we don’t see this, if as a consequence of our cynical pragmatism, we have lost the capacity to recognise the promise of emancipation, we in the West will have entered a post-democratic era, ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

Is there a link between Ahmadinejad and Berlusconi? Isn’t it preposterous even to compare Ahmadinejad with a democratically elected Western leader? Unfortunately, it isn’t: the two are part of the same global process. If there is one person to whom monuments will be built a hundred years from now, Peter Sloterdijk once remarked, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who thought up and put into practice a ‘capitalism with Asian values’. The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. Deng Xiaoping praised Singapore as the model that all of China should follow. Until now, capitalism has always seemed to be inextricably linked with democracy; it’s true there were, from time to time, episodes of direct dictatorship, but, after a decade or two, democracy again imposed itself (in South Korea, for example, or Chile). Now, however, the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.

This doesn’t mean, needless to say, that we should renounce democracy in favour of capitalist progress, but that we should confront the limitations of parliamentary representative democracy. The American journalist Walter Lippmann coined the term ‘manufacturing consent’, later made famous by Chomsky, but Lippmann intended it in a positive way. Like Plato, he saw the public as a great beast or a bewildered herd, floundering in the ‘chaos of local opinions’. The herd, he wrote in Public Opinion (1922), must be governed by ‘a specialised class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality’: an elite class acting to circumvent the primary defect of democracy, which is its inability to bring about the ideal of the ‘omni-competent citizen’. There is no mystery in what Lippmann was saying, it is manifestly true; the mystery is that, knowing it, we continue to play the game. We act as though we were free, not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction tell us what to do and think.

In this sense, in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king, but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive. The problem of democratic legitimacy is homologous to the problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to make it seem that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call the ‘crisis of democracy’ isn’t something that happens when people stop believing in their own power but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, when they perceive that the throne is empty, that the decision is now theirs. ‘Free elections’ involve a minimal show of politeness when those in power pretend that they do not really hold the power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to grant it to them.

Alain Badiou has proposed a distinction between two types (or rather levels) of corruption in democracy: the first, empirical corruption, is what we usually understand by the term, but the second pertains to the form of democracy per se, and the way it reduces politics to the negotiation of private interests. This distinction becomes visible in the (rare) case of an honest ‘democratic’ politician who, while fighting empirical corruption, nonetheless sustains the formal space of the other sort. (There is, of course, also the opposite case of the empirically corrupted politician who acts on behalf of the dictatorship of Virtue.)

‘If democracy means representation,’ Badiou writes in De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, ‘it is first of all the representation of the general system that bears its forms. In other words: electoral democracy is only representative in so far as it is first of all the consensual representation of capitalism, or of what today has been renamed the “market economy”. This is its underlying corruption.’[*] At the empirical level multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ – mirrors, registers, measures – the quantitative dispersal of people’s opinions, what they think about the parties’ proposed programmes and about their candidates etc. However, in a more radical, ‘transcendental’ sense, multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ – instantiates – a certain vision of society, politics and the role of the individuals in it. Multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ a precise vision of social life in which politics is organised so that parties compete in elections to exert control over the state legislative and executive apparatus. This transcendental frame is never neutral – it privileges certain values and practices – and this becomes palpable in moments of crisis or indifference, when we experience the inability of the democratic system to register what people want or think. In the UK elections of 2005, for example, despite Tony Blair’s growing unpopularity, there was no way for this disaffection to find political expression. Something was obviously very wrong here: it wasn’t that people didn’t know what they wanted, but rather that cynicism, or resignation, prevented them from acting.

This is not to say that democratic elections should be despised; the point is only to insist that they are not in themselves an indication of the true state of affairs; as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa. Take an unproblematic example: France in 1940. Even Jacques Duclos, the number two in the French Communist Party, admitted that if, at that point in time, free elections had been held in France, Marshal Pétain would have won with 90 per cent of the vote. When De Gaulle refused to acknowledge France’s capitulation and continued to resist, he claimed that only he, and not the Vichy regime, spoke on behalf of the true France (not, note, on behalf of the ‘majority of the French’). He was claiming to be speaking the truth even if it had no democratic legitimacy and was clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people. There can be democratic elections which enact a moment of truth: elections in which, against its sceptical-cynical inertia, the majority momentarily ‘awakens’ and votes against the hegemonic opinion; however, that such elections are so exceptional shows that they are not as such a medium of truth.

It is democracy’s authentic potential that is losing ground with the rise of authoritarian capitalism, whose tentacles are coming closer and closer to the West. The change always takes place in accordance with a country’s values: Putin’s capitalism with ‘Russian values’ (the brutal display of power), Berlusconi’s capitalism with ‘Italian values’ (comical posturing). Both Putin and Berlusconi rule in democracies which are gradually being reduced to an empty shell, and, in spite of the rapidly worsening economic situation, they both enjoy popular support (more than two-thirds of the electorate). No wonder they are personal friends: each of them has a habit of ‘spontaneous’ outbursts (which, in Putin’s case, are prepared in advance in conformity with the Russian ‘national character’). From time to time, Putin likes to use a dirty word or utter an obscene threat. When, a couple of years ago, a Western journalist asked him an awkward question about Chechnya, Putin snapped back that, if the man wasn’t yet circumcised, he was cordially invited to Moscow, where they have excellent surgeons who would cut a little more radically than usual.

Berlusconi is a significant figure, and Italy an experimental laboratory where our future is being worked out. If our political choice is between permissive-liberal technocratism and fundamentalist populism, Berlusconi’s great achievement has been to reconcile the two, to embody both at the same time. It is arguably this combination which makes him unbeatable, at least in the near future: the remains of the Italian ‘left’ are now resigned to him as their fate. This is perhaps the saddest aspect of his reign: his democracy is a democracy of those who win by default, who rule through cynical demoralisation.

Berlusconi acts more and more shamelessly: not only ignoring or neutralising legal investigations into his private business interests, but behaving in such a way as to undermine his dignity as head of state. The dignity of classical politics stems from its elevation above the play of particular interests in civil society: politics is ‘alienated’ from civil society, it presents itself as the ideal sphere of the citoyen in contrast to the conflict of selfish interests that characterise the bourgeois. Berlusconi has effectively abolished this alienation: in today’s Italy, state power is directly exerted by the bourgeois, who openly exploits it as a means to protect his own economic interest, and who parades his personal life as if he were taking part in a reality TV show.

The last tragic US president was Richard Nixon: he was a crook, but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideals and ambitions on the one hand, and political realities on the other. With Ronald Reagan (and Carlos Menem in Argentina), a different figure entered the stage, a ‘Teflon’ president no longer expected to stick to his electoral programme, and therefore impervious to factual criticism (remember how Reagan’s popularity went up after every public appearance, as journalists enumerated his mistakes). This new presidential type mixes ‘spontaneous’ outbursts with ruthless manipulation.

The wager behind Berlusconi’s vulgarities is that the people will identify with him as embodying the mythic image of the average Italian: I am one of you, a little bit corrupt, in trouble with the law, in trouble with my wife because I’m attracted to other women. Even his grandiose enactment of the role of the noble politician, il cavaliere, is more like an operatic poor man’s dream of greatness. Yet we shouldn’t be fooled: behind the clownish mask there is a state power that functions with ruthless efficiency. Perhaps by laughing at Berlusconi we are already playing his game. A technocratic economic administration combined with a clownish façade does not suffice, however: something more is needed. That something is fear, and here Berlusconi’s two-headed dragon enters: immigrants and ‘communists’ (Berlusconi’s generic name for anyone who attacks him, including the Economist).

Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing. The fat panda dreams of becoming a kung fu warrior. He is chosen by blind chance (beneath which lurks the hand of destiny, of course), to be the hero to save his city, and succeeds. But the film’s pseudo-Oriental spiritualism is constantly undermined by a cynical humour. The surprise is that this continuous making-fun-of-itself makes it no less spiritual: the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. A well-known anecdote about Niels Bohr illustrates the same idea. Surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr’s country house, a visiting scientist said he didn’t believe that horseshoes kept evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr answered: ‘Neither do I; I have it there because I was told that it works just as well if one doesn’t believe in it!’ This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware that they are corrupt, but we practise them anyway because we assume they work even if we don’t believe in them. Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’

To get a glimpse of the reality beneath this deception, call to mind the events of July 2008, when the Italian government proclaimed a state of emergency in the whole of Italy as a response to the illegal entry of immigrants from North Africa and Eastern Europe. At the beginning of August, it made a show of deploying 4000 armed soldiers to control sensitive points in big cities (train stations, commercial centres and so on.) A state of emergency was introduced without any great fuss: life was to go on as normal. Is this not the state we are approaching in developed countries all around the world, where this or that form of emergency (against the terrorist threat, against immigrants) is simply accepted as a measure necessary to guarantee the normal run of things?

What is the reality of this state of emergency? On 7 August 2007, a crew of seven Tunisian fishermen dropped anchor 30 miles south of the island of Lampedusa off Sicily. Awakened by screams, they saw a rubber boat crammed with starving people – 44 African migrants, as it turned out – on the point of sinking. The captain decided to bring them to the nearest port, at Lampedusa, where his entire crew was arrested. On 20 September, the fishermen went on trial in Sicily for the crime of ‘aiding and abetting illegal immigration’. If convicted, they would get between one and 15 years in jail. Everyone agreed that the real point of this absurd trial was to dissuade other boats from doing the same: no action was taken against other fishermen who, when they found themselves in similar situations, apparently beat the migrants away with sticks, leaving them to drown. What the incident demonstrates is that Agamben’s notion of homo sacer – the figure excluded from the civil order, who can be killed with impunity – is being realised not only in the US war on terror, but also in Europe, the supposed bastion of human rights and humanitarianism.

The formula of ‘reasonable anti-semitism’ was best formulated in 1938 by Robert Brasillach, who saw himself as a ‘moderate’ anti-semite:

We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; and the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz … We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organise any pogroms. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti-semitism is to organise a reasonable anti-semitism.

Our governments righteously reject populist racism as ‘unreasonable’ by our democratic standards, and instead endorse ‘reasonably’ racist protective measures. ‘We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and Eastern European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers,’ today’s Brasillachs, some of them social democrats, are telling us. ‘We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organise any pogroms. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable, violent actions of the instinctual anti-immigrant is to organise reasonable anti-immigrant protection.’ A clear passage from direct barbarism to Berlusconian barbarism with a human face

The Party : The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers

Slavoj Žižek

read (The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor)


Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin’s crimes was a political act from which, as his biographer William Taubman put it, ‘the Soviet regime never fully recovered, and neither did he.’ Although it was plainly opportunistic, there was just as plainly more to it than that, a kind of reckless excess that cannot be accounted for in terms of political strategy. The speech so undermined the dogma of infallible leadership that the entire nomenklatura sank into temporary paralysis. A dozen or so delegates collapsed during the speech, and had to be carried out and given medical help; one of them, Boleslaw Bierut, the hardline general secretary of the Polish Communist Party, died of a heart attack. The model Stalinist writer Alexander Fadeyev actually shot himself a few days later. The point is not that they were ‘honest Communists’: most of them were brutal manipulators without any illusions about the Soviet regime. What broke down was their ‘objective’ illusion, the figure of the ‘big Other’ as a background against which they could exert their ruthlessness and drive for power. They had displaced their belief onto this Other, which, as it were, believed on their behalf. Now their proxy had disintegrated.

Khrushchev was gambling that his (limited) confession would strengthen the Communist movement, and in the short term he was right: one should always remember that Khrushchev’s era was the last period of authentic Communist enthusiasm, of belief in the Communist project. When, during his visit to the US in 1959, he said to the US agriculture secretary, ‘Your grandchildren will live under Communism,’ he was stating the conviction of the entire Soviet nomenklatura. Even when Gorbachev attempted a more radical confrontation with the past (rehabilitations included Bukharin), Lenin remained unassailable, and Trotsky continued to be a non-person.

Compare these events with the Chinese way of breaking with the Maoist past. As Richard McGregor shows in The Party, Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reforms’ proceeded in a radically different way. In the organisation of the economy (and, up to a point, the culture), what is usually perceived as ‘Communism’ was abandoned, and the gates were opened to what, in the West, is called ‘liberalisation’: private property, the pursuit of profit, a life-style based on hedonist individualism etc. The Party maintained its hegemony, not through doctrinal orthodoxy (in official discourse, the Confucian notion of the Harmonious Society replaced practically all reference to Communism), but by securing the status of the Communist Party as the only guarantee of China’s stability and prosperity.

One consequence of the Party’s need to maintain hegemony is its close monitoring and regulation of the way Chinese history is presented, especially that of the last two centuries. The story ceaselessly recycled by the state media and textbooks is of China’s humiliation, which is supposed to have begun with the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century and ended only with the Communist victory in 1949. To be a patriot is to support the rule of the Communist Party. When history is used for the purposes of legitimation, it cannot support any substantial self-critique. The Chinese learned the lesson of Gorbachev’s failure: full recognition of the ‘founding crimes’ brings the entire system down: they must be disavowed. True, some Maoist ‘excesses’ and ‘errors’ were denounced (the Great Leap Forward and the widespread famine that followed it; the Cultural Revolution), and Deng’s assessment of Mao’s role (70 per cent positive and 30 per cent negative) is enshrined in official discourse. But Deng’s assessment functions as a formal conclusion that makes any further discussion or elaboration superfluous. Mao may be 30 per cent bad, but he continues to be celebrated as the founding father of the nation, his body in a mausoleum and his image on every banknote. In a clear case of fetishistic disavowal, everyone knows that Mao made errors and caused immense suffering, yet his image remains magically untainted. This way, the Chinese Communists can have their cake and eat it: economic liberalisation is combined with the continuation of Party rule.

How does this work in practice? How is Party hegemony combined with the modern state apparatus needed to regulate an exploding market economy? What institutional reality sustains the official slogan that good stock-market performance (high returns on investments) is the way to fight for socialism? What we have in China isn’t simply a combination of a private capitalist economy and Communist political power. In one way or another, state and Party own the majority of China’s companies, especially the large ones: it is the Party itself which demands that they perform well in the market. To resolve this apparent contradiction, Deng concocted a unique dual system. ‘As an organisation, the Party sits outside, and above the law,’ He Weifang, a law professor from Beijing, tells McGregor: ‘It should have a legal identity, in other words, a person to sue, but it is not even registered as an organisation. The Party exists outside the legal system altogether.’ ‘It would seem difficult,’ McGregor writes,

to hide an organisation as large as the Chinese Communist Party, but it cultivates its backstage role with care. The big party departments controlling personnel and the media keep a purposely low public profile. The Party committees (known as ‘leading small groups’) which guide and dictate policy to ministries, which in turn have the job of executing it, work out of sight. The make-up of all these committees, and in many cases even their existence, is rarely referred to in the state-controlled media, let alone any discussion of how they arrive at decisions.

An anecdote from Deng Xiaoping’s era illustrates the weirdness of the Party hierarchy. Deng was still alive, though retired from the post of general secretary, when one of the top members of the nomenklatura was purged. The official reason was that, in an interview with a foreign journalist, he had divulged a state secret: namely, that Deng was still the supreme authority and was effectively taking all the decisions. In fact everybody knew that Deng was still pulling the strings; it’s just that it was never allowed to be officially stated. The secret was not simply a secret: it announced itself as a secret. Thus, today, it isn’t that people are supposed not to know that a hidden Party structure shadows the state agencies: they are supposed to be fully aware that there is such a hidden network.

The government and other state organs, ‘which ostensibly behave much as they do in many countries’, are centre stage: the Ministry of Finance proposes the budget, courts deliver verdicts, universities teach and award degrees, priests lead rituals. So, on the one hand, we have the legal system, the government, the elected national assembly, the judiciary, the rule of law etc. But on the other – as the official term ‘Party and state leadership’ indicates: ‘Party’ always comes first – we have the Party, which is omnipresent but always in the background. The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo was a recognition of the tensions and antagonisms that underlie the Chinese success story, but also a reminder that the simple transformation of China into a parliamentary democracy would be as likely to aggravate these antagonisms as to resolve them.

There are, of course, many states, some even formally democratic, in which a half-secret coterie controls the government; in apartheid South Africa, for example, it was the Broederbond. What makes the Chinese case unique is that this doubling of power between public and hidden realms is itself institutionalised.

Nominations to key posts – in Party and state organs, but also in large companies – are made first by a Party body, the Central Organisation Department, whose headquarters in Beijing have no listed phone number and no sign outside. Their decisions, once made, are passed to legal organs – state assemblies, managerial boards – which then go through the ritual of confirming them by vote. The same double procedure – first the Party, then the state – obtains at every level, including fundamental economic policy, which is first debated by the Party, and its decisions then implemented by government bodies. The gap between Party and state is most obvious in the anti-corruption struggle: when there is suspicion that some high functionary is involved in corruption, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, a Party organ, investigates the charges unrestricted by legal niceties: suspects are liable to be kidnapped, subjected to harsh interrogation and held for as long as six months. The verdict eventually reached will depend not only on the facts but also on complex behind the scenes negotiations between different Party cliques, and if the functionary is found guilty, only then is he handed over to the state legal bodies. But by this stage everything is already decided and the trial is a formality – only the sentence is (sometimes) negotiable.

The irony is that the Party itself, its complex workings hidden from public scrutiny, is the ultimate source of corruption. The inner circle, comprising top Party and state functionaries as well as chiefs of industry, communicate via an exclusive phone network, the ‘Red Machine’ – possessing one of its unlisted numbers is a clear sign of one’s status. A vice-minister tells McGregor that ‘more than half of the calls he received on his “red machine” were requests for favours from senior Party officials, along the lines of: “Can you give my son, daughter, niece, nephew, cousin or good friend and so on, a job?”’

At the Party congress, which takes place every eight years or so, the new central executive – the nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo – is presented as a fait accompli. The selection procedure involves complex behind the scenes negotiations; the assembled delegates, who are not told ahead of time who will be put forward, are formally invited to vote on the selection, but invariably give it their unanimous approval. The most powerful figure in the Party as a rule (but not always) takes three titles: president of the republic, general secretary of the Party, and chairman of the Central Military Commission (the head of the military). The latter two titles are much more important than the first. The People’s Liberation Army is a thoroughly politicised entity, following Mao’s motto that ‘the Party commands the gun.’ In bourgeois states, the army is supposed to be apolitical, a neutral force protecting the constitutional order; for the Chinese Communists, such a depoliticised army would be the greatest threat imaginable, since the army is their guarantee that the state will remain subordinated to the Party. If it is to function, such a structure has to rely on a delicate balance between force and protocol. Because the Party acts outside the law, a complex set of unwritten rules govern how one is expected to follow Party decisions.

The notion of the Party-state cannot do justice to the complexities of 20th-century Communism: there is always a gap between Party and state, and the Party functions as the state’s shadowy double. Dissenters call for a new politics of distance from the state, but they don’t recognise that the Party is this distance: it embodies a fundamental distrust of the state, its organs and mechanisms, as if they needed to be controlled, kept in check, at all times. A true 20th-century Communist never fully accepts the state: he accepts the need for an agency, immune to the law, which has the power to supervise the state’s activities.

This model will, of course, be criticised as being non-democratic. The ethico-political preference for a democratic model in which parties are – formally, at least – subordinate to state mechanisms falls into the trap of the ‘democratic fiction’. It ignores the fact that, in a ‘free’ society, domination and servitude are located in the ‘apolitical’ economic sphere of property and managerial power. The Party’s distance from state apparatuses and its ability to act without legal constraint afford a unique possibility: ‘illegal’ activity can be undertaken not only in the interest of the market but – sometimes – in the interest of the workers too. For example, when the 2008 financial crisis hit China, the instinctive reaction of the Chinese banks was to follow the cautious approach of Western banks, radically cutting back on lending to companies wishing to expand. Informally (no law legitimised this), the Party simply ordered the banks to release credit, and thus succeeded – for the time being – in sustaining the growth of the Chinese economy. To take another example, Western governments complain that their industries cannot compete with the Chinese in producing green technology, since Chinese companies get financial support from their government. But what’s wrong with that? Why doesn’t the West simply follow China and do the same?

But China is no Singapore (neither, for that matter, is Singapore): it is not a stable country with an authoritarian regime that guarantees harmony and keeps capitalism under control. Every year, thousands of rebellions by workers, farmers and minorities have to be put down by the police and the army. No wonder official propaganda insists obsessively on the notion of the harmonious society: this very excess bears witness to the opposite, to the threat of chaos and disorder. One should bear in mind the basic rule of Stalinist hermeneutics: since the official media do not openly report trouble, the most reliable way to detect it is to look out for compensatory excesses in state propaganda: the more ‘harmony’ is celebrated, the more chaos and antagonism there is in reality. China is barely under control. It threatens to explode.


* Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times was published in the summer. He is now writing a ‘mega-book’ about Hegel – ‘a true work of love

PROOFINESS : The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

Charles Seife's 'Proofiness,' reviewed by John Allen Paulos

The title of Charles Seife's new book, "Proofiness," is a takeoff on Stephen Colbert's notion of truthiness, the property of statements that have the ring of truth to them but upon a little reflection are seen to be bogus. Likewise, proofiness refers to numbers and statistical arguments that seem convincing but are really somewhere between unwarranted and ludicrous. Seife begins by pointing out that numbers in the news do not inhabit some ideal Platonic realm but result from very fallible measurements that are often based on vague definitions or faulty assumptions.

He tells the story of the museum guard who claimed the dinosaur on exhibit was 65,000,038 years old. When pressed about the precision of the number, the guard says that a scientist told him the dinosaur was 65 million years old when he was hired 38 years before. Seife calls this error "disestimation," the mathematical sin of underestimating the uncertainties associated with most numbers.

He gives cute names to other types of proofiness as well: Potemkin numbers, those without even a tenuous connection to reality, such as Joe McCarthy's charge of the State Department harboring 205 communists; cherrypicking, examining only data favorable to one's position; randumbness, the tendency to see patterns and order in random data; causuistry, ascribing causes to accidental associations; risk mismanagement, misjudging or even lying about risk, often so that the people assuming it are not the ones reaping its rewards; and so on.

These mathematical solecisms are illustrated with many topical examples, ranging from the non-perils of NutraSweet and the inequities of the death penalty to the numerical skullduggery behind the U.S. abandonment of the nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union in 1982. That last case involved a nonsensical formula that led to a spurious allegation of Soviet cheating. The second half of the book is devoted to somewhat fuller discussions of issues such as the U.S. census and its problems; gerrymandering, which seems to be tolerated if it is politically, rather than racially, motivated; the mortgage crisis, including a particularly clear and brief discussion of it via an analogy involving fire insurance, whereby fire insurance policies are imagined to be bundled and sold the way mortgages were; and close elections, particularly the 2008 Franken-Coleman Senate race in Minnesota and the 2000 Bush-Gore contest.

With regard to the latter, Seife urges acceptance of the uncomfortable fact that some races are essentially ties, that the official and meaningless "exact totals" are sometimes overwhelmed by systemic errors in counting, the vagueness of the election laws and the unclear criteria, definitions and protocols governing them. As I wrote in 2000, trying to determine whether Gore or Bush received more votes in Florida was a bit like trying to measure bacteria with a yardstick. The official 537-vote difference between them recalls the absurdity of the 65,000,038-year-old dinosaur.

Throughout the book, Seife's practiced journalist's eye results in trenchant nonmathematical observations. He notes, for example, that in a very close election the candidate in the lead almost always takes the position that "rules are rules" and the candidate who is behind almost always argues to "count every vote."

Seife condemns the 2000 Supreme Court decision forbidding the use of statistical sampling to ascertain the number of households missed by census workers. Likening the decision to poll taxes, literacy tests and voter ID laws, he notes that its effect is an apportionment of House seats that disenfranchises millions of largely minority voters. The decision seems not only unfair but also inconsistent. For example, if an answer on a census form looks wrong -- say someone claims 1,000,000 children -- census workers are allowed to replace this number with one reflecting what statistically similar households have reported. This imputation and others in common use also violate the prohibition of statistical techniques, but the court has accepted them.

Polls, of course, play an important role in a journalist's craft(iness), and Seife writes that they are one of the primary sources of proofiness in modern life. Real, unpredictable events provide fodder for journalists and commentators, but polls and pseudoevents, which he defines as synthetic, planned and occurring at convenient times and locations, are almost as good for this purpose. Moreover, polls are subject not just to the statistical margin of error but, more crucially, to systemic shortcomings and tendentious special pleading as well.

Disposing of arithmetical mistakes, misjudgments and misunderstandings is, like trash removal, a never-ending job. Seife performs it cogently and entertainingly without resorting to arcane mathematics. The effort is important because the cumulative effect of proofiness is, as he sagely concludes, "toxic to a democracy."

*John Allen Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple University and the author of "Innumeracy," "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" and, most recently, "Irreligion."

A power struggle in Iran : The president's awkward friend

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, pictured right, is at risk of falling out with Iran’s clergy because of the rise of the controversial confidant who stands behind him

Sep 9th 2010


IN THE summer of 2009 Iran’s divided conservatives came together to save the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after his disputed re-election provoked huge street protests by the reformist Green Movement. To have lost Mr Ahmadinejad to a liberal “plot” would, they judged, have imperilled the Islamic Republic which succours them all.

All the same, many conservatives are far from enamoured of Iran’s president. Challenging him, however, is turning out to be a different matter. Barely a year into his second and constitutionally final term, his future is again the object of dark speculation, only this time by people who once professed to be his friends. His immediate entourage, in particular, is being castigated and none more so than the man whom, it is thought, Mr Ahmadinejad would like to succeed him: his old friend and relation by marriage, Esfandiar Rahim Mashai.

As the president’s closest adviser, the slim, handsome, self-confident Mr Mashai has come to represent all that traditionalists in Shia Iran find odious about Mr Ahmadinejad’s presidency. The Islamic Republic was founded on the idea that the Muslim community awaits the reappearance of the hidden “12th imam”, a messianic leader who was “occulted”—hidden by God—in the ninth century; in the meantime it is up to the clergy to run human affairs, under an arrangement known as the Guardianship of the Jurist. Mr Mashai, it is strongly rumoured, believes himself to have a direct link to the hidden imam, and hence regards the intercession of Iran’s clergy as superfluous. He is also said to have encouraged the president’s well-known millenarian tendencies.

For long, Mr Mashai’s critics have expressed their fears sotto voce. Over the course of the summer, however, several conservatives openly raised fears of a campaign among Mr Ahmadinejad’s closest allies to drive the clergy from public life. Last month, a conservative parliamentarian, Hamid Rasai, revealed that the country’s current “guardian-jurist”, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had spoken to him and a few other deputies about a “new plot” carrying even greater danger than last year’s protests. Mr Rasai hinted that Mr Mashai and the Green Movement, albeit now much diminished, may be working in sinister concert; after all, he pointed out, both are “uncommitted to the Guardianship of the Jurist”.

Reverence for the hidden imam has long been an accepted part of Shia Islam, but millenarian zeal has produced schismatics in the past—the Bahais, for instance, who are now banned and persecuted. From a position of ostentatious piety, Mr Mashai clearly feels he has the licence to behave provocatively. He has renounced hostility for the people of Israel (for which he received a dressing down from Mr Khamenei), suggested that Iran is incapable of dealing with modern challenges, and flirted impiously with a famous actress. Were he a reformist, it is likely that he would have been silenced months ago.

In August Mr Mashai caused perhaps his biggest rumpus to date, when he urged hundreds of expatriate Iranians, who had been invited to Tehran at government expense, to act as propagandists for a national ideology, as opposed to an Islamic one. Lacing his address with references to Iran’s pre-Islamic history and claiming that Iran had saved Islam from Arab parochialism, Mr Mashai’s patriotic theme provoked a storm of recrimination from members of the religious establishment. “If someone turns away from Islam,” warned Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, a longtime leading government supporter, “we warn him, and then, if that does not work, we beat him.”

In the eyes of his enemies, Mr Mashai’s position at the heart of the government, and his repeated protestations of loyalty to the Guardianship of the Jurist, make him all the more threatening. Last summer Mr Khamenei stripped Mr Mashai of the vice-presidency he had just been awarded, only for the unrepentant Mr Ahmadinejad to appoint him his chief of staff. Nowadays Mr Mashai is more likely to be seen hobnobbing with foreign heads of state in his role as the president’s representative on Middle Eastern affairs.

Mr Mashai is a member of a new diplomatic team that Mr Ahmadinejad has set up independently of the foreign ministry, which is controlled by the supreme leader. The president’s “experts” are not known for their subtlety; his senior vice-president recently called the British “a bunch of imbeciles” and the Australians “cowherds.” The foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, is at odds with some of these presidential experts. In any event, they have a serious intent: to exploit what they believe to be Iran’s enhanced position in the world and to use it to their advantage back home.

In Mr Ahmadinejad’s view, Iran’s refusal to buckle under increasing international sanctions aimed at halting its progress towards becoming a nuclear power qualifies it as a world player on a level with the old enemy, the United States. Last month Iran passed its latest milestone with the fuelling of its first power-generating reactor, set up long ago by the Russians at Bushehr. Iran’s president has challenged Barack Obama to join him before the media for a “man to man” debate on “world issues” when the two attend the UN’s General Assembly in New York later this month.

Mr Obama is unlikely to give him satisfaction but Mr Ahmadinejad’s opponents fear any sign that the Americans regard him as a possible interlocutor, thereby raising his prestige at home. A senior ayatollah recently denounced those who are “trying to beat a path to negotiations with America”. Mr Mashai, who usually accompanies the president on his trips to New York, has also been accused of meeting a former American ambassador to Israel.

Whatever his ambitions abroad, Mr Ahmadinejad is playing a high-risk game at home. He has offended conservatives by appearing to condone less-than-Islamic dress for women, and has presided over a breakdown in co-operation between the government and parliament. Sanctions are starting to hurt, with investment dropping in key sectors, including oil and gas. The most painful of the president’s cuts in subsidies has yet to come into effect.

This dispute at the heart of Iran’s ruling establishment may seem arcane. After all, both Mr Ahmadinejad and his traditionalist opponents agree on the need to repress the Green Movement and to press on towards nuclear self-sufficiency. But the president fits uncomfortably into the country’s power structure, which rewards collegiate effort under the supreme leader’s benevolent tutelage. Although the president professes his undying loyalty to Mr Khamenei, his own patent ambition and his friend’s theology have led him perilously close to open defiance.

From the American and Western point of view, the very opacity of Iran’s leadership structure—and the continuing feuds within it—have made diplomacy harder. Indeed, it is unclear who indisputably runs the show, though the supreme leader still has the final say. It is plainly more complex than a struggle between conservatives and reformers.

Ayatollah Khamenei has tried his best to end the infighting, but his authority is limited by his record of support for Mr Ahmadinejad, which may be all that stops parliament from impeaching him. However according to Mr Mashai, it is only a matter of time before “certain people are calling Ahmadinejad an apostate.”