Bush's misbegotten Iran plan

IN AN ARTICLE titled ''The Iran Plans," published in a recent issue of The New Yorker, Seymour M. Hersh -- who helped bring the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to light -- examines what appear to be well-advanced White House plans for a bombing campaign against Iran. Such bombing, according to his findings, might include the use of ''tactical" nuclear weapons, for it seems that Iran's recently elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a ''potential Adolf Hitler."

Though any story based on deliberate leaks is open to a certain skepticism -- who is doing the leaking; what is their real objective -- elements in Hersh's article ring a painful bell. He alleges that President Bush's ultimate goal in his confrontation with Iran is, once again, regime change and that the president believes that ''saving Iran will be his legacy."

Far from saving Iran, if he goes ahead with this plan, Bush will be hailed as the savior of Islamic fundamentalism.

Surely recent United States experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has made one fact clear: US military action is not an efficient tool for defeating religious extremism or promoting democracy.

In Afghanistan, disgust at warlords whom the US military signed up as proxies and then ushered into positions of power has much of the exasperated population cursing the very word ''democracy" and harking back nostalgically to the Taliban era as one of at least some law and order. Now, when Taliban knock on village doors at night asking for succor, few see a reason to risk denying it.

Iraq is a disaster beyond telling. The White House's obstinate refusal to plan for anything but a best-case scenario and its conscious manipulation of ethnic divisions -- a tactic that is also reportedly part of the Iran plans -- has brought the country to the brink of civil war.

To assume that an American bombing campaign would trigger a spontaneous uprising and endear the United States to the Iranian people is to fantasize -- once again.

The effect would be the opposite. US bombing is perhaps the only thing that would force Iran's frustrated, energetic, sophisticated, largely young population to rally round its discredited leaders. And this is why the Iranian government is so assiduously waving the red flag of its nuclear ambitions in front of the American bull. Because it knows that only prompt US military action could save it from the humiliation its own population is preparing.

What remains of Iran's Islamic Republic today is an illusion -- a facade of faith supported by deceitful rhetoric. And all Iran knows it. The regime is out of support.

Ironically, it is not the American Great Satan that has so successfully gutted the Islamic Republic, but Iranian leaders themselves. They have stripped it of religious as well as political legitimacy.

First Mohammad Khatami, hailed at home and abroad as a reformer, promised to expand civil liberties and break the political monopoly of so-called rogue ministries. Instead, he stood by while Iran's hardliners cracked down on the universities, silenced the press, and rigged parliamentary elections. No wonder disappointed Iranians wanted him out of office.

His successor, Ahmadinejad, presented the Iranian people with another Faustian bargain by promising to break the economic monopoly of Iran's corrupt religious establishment, personified by his wealthy opponent, Iran's former president Hashemi Rafsanjani. But, once in office Ahmadinejad demonstrated his affection for the poor by authorizing a crackdown on union leaders representing striking bus drivers.

Against this backdrop of manifestly bankrupt policies, the clash over nuclear enrichment has been a godsend for Iran's fundamentalist clergy, for it is allowing them to shed their religious skins and don the cloak of nationalism.

The only obstacle to Iran's emergence as an economic and political superpower, according to the myth the government is trying to spin for internal consumption, would seem to be the shortage of electricity caused by the absence of enriched uranium. The scarcity, poverty, misery, and depression the country has suffered under the ayatollahs are supposedly due to this one lack.

Like the genie buried in Aladdin's lamp, ''Imam Uraniumullah" is expected to restore the faith by capturing the energy of matter and harnessing it to the country's development. Or -- for the vast majority of the Iranian population that sees through that cant -- enrichment, by helping Iran accede to the world's most select club, will provide the people with some ineffable sense of grandeur that could make up for all the rest.

Instead of puncturing the myth and watching the Islamic Republic fizzle out like an empty balloon, ''the Iran plan" legitimizes and solidifies the ideological and emotional foundations of the Iranian ayatollahs' rule. For, if acted upon, it would permit the Islamic Republic to cover up its crimes beneath the corpses of new ''martyrs," while blaming its own myriad failures on the United States.

Rather than stepping into such an obvious lose-lose situation, President Bush should consider that it is not his bunker busting nuclear arsenal that can shake the ground beneath the Islamic Republic, but the Iranian people. After all, it is neither the United States and Israel, nor the United Nations and its membership, nor the continent of Europe, but the Iranian people who are the primary targets and principle foes of Iran's supreme leader and his faith in death and duplicity.

Sarah Chayes, a former National Public Radio reporter, has been working in Afghanistan since 2002. Amir Soltani Sheikholeslami is an Iranian-born human rights activist.